You don’t usually expect anything terribly profound on sports radio, and yet the other day I heard the most sublime description of watching the shadows of baseball players stretch over the field as dusk approached. The moment was described as “giving the mundane its beautiful due.”  Baseball game aside, the beauty of that moment in its inherent wonder was enthralling to its beholder. 

This made me think - how much more, then, has our Savior accomplished for our delight in the ordinary? Indeed, He came not just to give us life, but life in the full (John 10:10). Thus, He didn’t die just so that I could experience life on the margins. Yet the great disrupter in Satan wants to rob us of that life, and when I find myself inexplicably sad, my capacity to behold the lovely is lost. Lord, help me to see that you have came so that even the mundane has its beautiful due.

In Psalm 90, Moses declares that from “everlasting to everlasting” (v.2) God is God and beyond human accounting of time: “a thousand years in your sight are as yesterday when past” (v.4). Moses asserts that God’s wrath and anger are within His authority (v.11). He judges His people for their sin (vv.8-9) and we are but toast (translation mine). All this would point to us being given our just due were it not for the bookends to this psalm. It begins by highlighting God’s presence among His people throughout all generations (v.1) and the entire last section (vv.12-17) is a plea for God’s help in the here in the now (v.11, 15) - that is, in the dailyness of our routines (v.14), and in the activities of the present (v.17). How bold then is this prayer, knowing that though God is above all and infinite, we nevertheless ask that He be merciful to us in our present days, even in the mundane.