Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
He found God in the worst job in the monastery. And four hundred years later, we are still reading about it.
Brother Lawrence was a seventeenth-century monk in a French monastery. He was assigned to the kitchen. Not the chapel, not the scriptorium, not any of the places that sound appropriately holy. The kitchen. He washed dishes, he peeled vegetables, he scrubbed pots, he managed the provisions. For years.
He did not love it at first. He wrote honestly about that. But somewhere in that unglamorous, repetitive, ordinary work, he made a decision. He was going to practice the presence of God right there. Not after the kitchen shift, not in the chapel during formal prayer, not when he finally got a more spiritual assignment. There.
There is a moment in his letters that I keep coming back to. He wrote about picking up a straw from the floor. Just a piece of straw. And offering it to God. Not as a dramatic gesture. As a way of saying: even this, even this small thing, is for you.
He said he felt as close to God scrubbing pots as he did during formal prayer. Sometimes closer.
The practice of the presence
Brother Lawrence little book, The Practice of the Presence of God, is not long. You can read it in an afternoon. But it is one of those books that does not let you go. Because he is describing something so simple it feels obvious, and so difficult it requires a lifetime.
The practice is not a method or a technique. It is a discipline of awareness. A constant, gentle returning of attention to the fact that God is here. Right now. In this moment, in this room, in this task.
Not performed. Not announced. Just a quiet internal orientation, the way you might keep a friend in mind even when you are not directly talking to them.
What this looks like for us
I want to be careful here, because I do not think this is about making everything feel sacred through effort. That can quickly turn into a kind of spiritual exhaustion, where you are performing awareness instead of actually having it.
Brother Lawrence was not trying to make the kitchen spiritual. He was noticing that God was already in the kitchen. The shift is subtle but it is everything. It is the difference between importing holiness into the ordinary and recognizing that the ordinary has never been empty.
Your kitchen is not a waiting room for the holy. Your commute is not a gap between real spiritual moments. The conversation with your kid, the tedious email, the errand you have been putting off, these are not obstacles to your life with God. They might actually be the location of it.
Brother Lawrence would pick up a straw and offer it. What small, ordinary thing is in front of you right now that you could offer the same way?
Pick up the straw
Today, choose one ordinary task in your day, whether it is washing dishes, folding laundry, driving to work, or something else. As you do it, practice the presence of God in that moment. Offer the task to Him, even if just internally. Notice whether anything shifts in how you experience that task.
- Where in your life have you been treating the ordinary as a waiting room for the holy?
- What would it look like to practice the presence of God in your current season, whatever that looks like?
- What ordinary thing in front of you right now could you offer to God like Brother Lawrence offered the straw?
- How does knowing that God is already present change how you approach your daily tasks?
- What is the difference between trying to make something sacred and recognizing that God is already there?
- How does the awareness of Gods presence change the quality of your ordinary moments?
- What prevents you from experiencing God in the middle of your routine?
Lord, I want what Brother Lawrence found. Not the kitchen, but the posture. The one that sees you in the middle of the routine, the tedious, the unspectacular. Teach me to offer you the small things, the straw on the floor, the load of dishes, the ordinary hour. Let my whole day be a kind of prayer, not because I am performing devotion, but because you are actually in it. In Jesus Name, Amen.
The ordinary is not the waiting room for the holy. It is often the holy. The practice is simply noticing that God is already there.