It’s amazing how the every-day tasks of living can crowd in and keep you from doing what must be done. Take eating, for example. Even a quick meal takes an hour from preparation over eating to cleanup. Cleaning the house is also quite time-consuming and I usually find myself having to devote a whole day to the endeavor. But here’s the crazy part: the mundane is comfortable and, for me, even enjoyable. It’s not easy to be looking at the sublime, the spiritual, that which is beyond the every-day hum-drum.

Part of us longs for the exceptional, but at the same time I yearn for it only as a brief break from what is secure and every-day. However, even in the mundane we can become exceptional and for me it is always amazing when the spiritual breaks in to the earthly in that time of day called the “Quiet Time.” I’ve been reading Streams in the Desert1 as a companion to my regular reading. The daily entries have been very encouraging as they’ve almost always hit the nail on the head as to exactly what I needed to be thinking about that day. And the best part was, it helped me get beyond the hum-drum to what had to be done, despite its uncomfortableness and unusualness.

God gives strength and He has given me a new thought: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.” (2Ti. 1:7 – NLT). Thus, transcending the mundane takes one part faith one part daily refocusing and one part simply doing it.

• 1Mrs. Charles E. Cowman, Streams in the Desert (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971).