So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
1 Corinthians 10:31 NIV
I had a month left of my pregnancy and I was over being pregnant. I started off with minimal symptoms—I hadn’t gotten bad morning sickness or anything—but going into the third trimester I started getting carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand and arm. My right hand was almost totally numb by the last month and at night I would get a horrible pain in my arm, a pain so severe it would awaken me and keep me up for hours.
It was after one such Saturday night that I found myself stumbling around trying to get ready for church. After finally pulling together an outfit, I couldn’t find any shoes that fit because my feet were so swollen. I found myself in a meltdown in front of my husband (remember the post where I said he is longsuffering!). To top it all off, it was time to leave—past time actually, but we wouldn’t be too late if I could find shoes that I could get on my swollen feet. As I stood there, having hardly slept, blubbering about how nothing fit, how uncomfortable I was and how tired I was, my husband, who was ready and waiting to walk out the door, mentioned that perhaps I should do church from home that day. I resisted this idea—we should go to church! But since I still had no shoes that fit, I was easily swayed into watching the sermon with my feet up at home rather than from a hard pew.
My husband left for church and I moped around for a few minutes. I was mad. I was so uncomfortable—I was mad my feet were swollen, and mad at myself for not pulling it together and going to church. I looked around, I didn’t want to waste my day being in a bad mood—I needed a distraction! The floor needed mopping and I had just enough time to do it before the church service started. So I started mopping.
There is something about using your hands and putting your whole body into something that is totally absorbing and grounding. There is something about the mundane that anchors us in a way that cannot be done through technology. There is something about experiencing the tactile world through this kind of work that can bring us closer to God. This kind of work can be done as a type of worship.
Of course I am not suggesting that we stop attending church and start cleaning during this time instead! Church and the Sabbath are important. But this particular Sunday I committed my mopping to the Lord and did it as an act of worship. I put my whole self into it and prayed while I mopped. And do you know what? I believe God honored it. I finished the mopping in time to start the service but I felt like I had already been to church and had worshiped.
There are many things we have to do in this life that we would probably rather not do; the boring, the mundane, the difficult, and the dirty things in life. It’s easy to write it all off as meaningless, pointless, worthless. It’s easy to get sloppy with it and think that it doesn’t matter. It does matter though. In Colossians 3:17 we are told, “And whatever you do or say, do as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.” We also hear this again in I Corinthians, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (NIV) We hear echoes of this throughout scripture.
So whatever you are called to do, be it boring and mundane, or exciting and interesting, do it as unto the Lord, do it as worship, and commit your works to Him.