A Hymnal for Ordinary Time

It is Ordinary Time, the part of the church calendar that isn't dominated by a major holiday or season. It's just ordinary, everyday time. At Vintage, we are trying to see if we can find God in the ordinary time, in our work, the the beauty of everyday. Since most of our lives is lived not in the seasonal celebrations but in daily monotony, we would be in trouble if the presence of God couldn't be found in the everyday.

One of the ways we are challenging ourselves to find God in the everyday is to use everyday, ordinary music in our worship gatherings. We are trying to find God on the radio. So, we've given up on church music and worship songs. The Vintage hymnal now includes the likes of

Coldplay
Led Zeppelin
The Who
Tom Petty
Peter Gabriel
The Grateful Dead
The Beatles

In fact, we've started a Spotify playlist called Finding God in Ordinary Music. It is now over 100 songs and 6 hours of music. It's got everyone from U2 to Collective Soul, Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley to Meat Loaf. Yes. Meat Loaf.

Have there been songs that have been especially significant to you on your spiritual journey?
Have you been able to connect with God through everyday, ordinary music?
What songs have helped you find God on the radio?

God is all around us. God is everywhere. Here's proof:




.

Finding God in Ordinary Time

We are doing something a little different this June at Vintage. Over the past several years, we have participated in a couple of aspects of the church calendar - Advent and Lent. These always end up being wonderful seasons of connecting with God during the buildup to the celebrations of Christmas and Easter. I have come to love those times of year. We haven't done too much else with the church calendar beyond these two seasons. But I've been thinking a lot lately about the aptly named Ordinary Time, those times of the year that the church recognizes as non-seasonal, those weeks between the big festive holidays.

Most of life is spent in ordinary time.

And so, in June at Vintage, we have been asking ourselves if God can be found in Ordinary Time. How can we connect with God when we are not having the big, celebratory mountaintop experiences? Can our work be sacred? Do we have eyes to see and ears to hear the beauty of God in the everyday?

Here is the revelation I've had this week: I can't expect more of God than I expect of myself. If I want God to be present with me, I need to be present with God.

So I've been trying to pause to pray more during the course of the day.
I've been trying to take a walk and center myself once per day.
I've been trying to sit and be still more often.

And I am trying to be present.

I find great encouragement in the words of James, "Come near to God, and God will come near to you."

How about you? How do you find the presence of God in the ordinary and in the everyday?

.

The Rhythms of Life

In the past couple of years, Vanessa and I have been very concerned about recognizing that we were designed by God to live according to certain rhythms. We've discovered (Along with a lot of other people. I'm not suggesting that we are pioneers here.) that while technology has provided us with many wonderful advancements, sometimes the unintended consequences of our technology is that we get out of sync with the natural rhythms and routines of life.

Lights and TVs and iPads keep us up to all hours of the night.

Planes, trains, and automobiles move well-preserved foods from one corner of the globe to another.

Credit and even debit cards prevent us from connecting the dots between our labor and its fruit.

Microwaves and high speed internet keep us from ever having to wait.

And as a result, we have found ourselves tired, crabby, impatient. We've become more and more unhealthy. And we always have this sense of kind of being disconnected.

So, we have begun trying to reconnect to the rhythms of life. This hasn't been a whole-sale thing, changing everything about our lifestyle all at once. Rather than that, it has been a slow unfolding of new ways to find routine and rest in life, adding additional puzzle pieces as we begin to feel passionately about them.

Over the past couple of years, we've incorporated these kinds of things into our lives:

We are trying to eat as locally as possible, visiting the Farmer's Market, local produce stand, and buying pasture-fed local beef.

We also try to eat food when it is in season. Summer is for strawberries and peaches, regardless of what's for sale at Walmart in January.

We sabbath. Hard. On Sundays, we don't work. We spend time with friends, take naps, play on the Wii. And we have a Sunday evening routine with the kids - AFV and Extreme Makeover while we eat toast and hot chocolate.

We also have assigned the kids daily chores that they are expected to complete. And we pay them an allowance for them, every other week, like I get paid. Payday for me is payday for them. We've used the envelope system to help them spend their money wisely. And they each now have their own savings account.

We have become more conscious of the church calendar, caring about seasons like Advent and Lent.

With the arrival of the new year, I decided to participate again in the Daily Audio Bible. It's a daily podcast that reads through the Bible. I took a year or so off, but it feels good to make this a part of my morning routine again.

And, since the kids went back to school, we've added a new routine that we are very excited about. We have begun doing Morning and Evening Prayers as a family, using Shane Claiborne's Common Prayer as our guide.

Because our kids are early risers (read: Calvin), their job is to bring coffee to Mom and Dad at 6:45. They all pile into our bed and we do the prayer liturgy and readings together. Then, by 7, we are up and at 'em, ready to show the world what we're made of. We do Evening Prayers around the table when we are done with dinner.

It's only been three days so far. Two week from now I may be embarrassed that I put this out there because we've given up. But for right now, we are loving bookending our days with a recognition that God is here, that there is more going on than we can see, and that we are in this thing together.

.