...lift life heavenward

Lord, You make the common holy: “This My body, this My blood.”

Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward,

asking that the world around us share Your children’s liberty:

with the Spirit’s gifts empower us for the work of ministry.

---Jeffrey Rowthorn, 1978

Have you ever known someone with the touch? Someone who could take the most ordinary day and imbue it with otherworldliness? Turn an everyday action into a ritual of uncommon beauty? Take a passing conversation and bless the words exchanged, draw out the pain and joy masked behind safely neutral words and phrases?

I feel like Jesus must have been one of these rare persons. There are so many recorded instances of him breathing holiness into the mundane everyday of existence—everyday tasks, everyday conversations, everyday touches. In Jesus’ hands, touch healed disease and stigma, the fruit of wheat and vine became sacred sign. In Jesus’ mouth, names spoken called fishermen from their nets, taxmen from their graft, the dead from their repose, faithful women from their grief.

Is the gift for crafting sacredness from ordinariness, then, Jesus’ gift uniquely? Or are we to be imitators of Christ in this too, always open for the Spirit to move in us to transform the common into the holy…in the midst of us…through us?

Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward…