Tonight in Waco, Texas, students and townspeople are filing into Waco Hall for a worship night hosted by Baylor's Spiritual Life office, with Douglas Kaine McKelvey, the author of Every Moment Holy, joining them. I have no stake in Baylor and I have never been to Waco. But that title stopped me in my tracks, and I have been carrying it around all morning like a stone in my pocket.
Every moment holy. Not every Sunday. Not every conference, every altar call, every mountaintop. Every moment. Including this one, whatever you are doing while you read this — waiting on a coffee maker, sitting in a parked truck, half-listening to a kid tell you about a dream he had.
We are quietly convinced that most of life doesn't count
Most of us run on an unspoken math. There is the sacred column: worship, prayer, the Bible, church. And there is the other column, the long one, the one with the dishes and the invoices and the drive to Muskegon and the 4th-grade math homework. We assume God is genuinely interested in the first column and politely tolerant of the second.
Paul will not let us keep the books that way. "And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Colossians 3:17). Whatever you do. Word or deed. That is not a verse about church attendance; that is a verse about Tuesday. He wrote it to people whose days were mostly labor and laundry, and he told them the name of Jesus reaches all the way down into it.
Holiness is not intensity
Here is where the sacred column gets us into trouble. If only the spiritual peaks count, then a good life becomes a chase for peaks — and everything in between feels like dead air you have to get through. That is exhausting, and it is not what Scripture describes. Holiness in the Bible is not intensity. It is belonging. A thing is holy because it has been set apart for God's use. The cup on the table in the temple was not more emotional than other cups. It was just given away.
Which means an ordinary hour becomes holy the moment you hand it over. You do not have to feel anything. You just have to say, in effect, this one is Yours too — this shift, this phone call, this hour of sitting with someone who is hurting and has run out of words.
The Spirit is not waiting for Sunday
And when we hand those hours over, God does things in them. I watch it in this church. Someone gets a nudge in the middle of an ordinary workday to call a person they had not thought about in months, and it turns out that person was at the end of their rope. Someone prays over a kitchen table and there is real healing. Someone who had nothing to give shows up anyway and the Holy Spirit gives them exactly the word another person needed. None of that happened in a sanctuary. All of it was holy.
I want to say this carefully, because some of you have prayed in the ordinary hours and nothing visible changed. The diagnosis stayed. The door stayed shut. Hear me: that hour was not wasted and it was not a failure of faith. Jesus prayed in a garden and the cup did not pass. The Father was never closer to Him than in that hour. God is not grading your moments by their outcomes.
Eleven o'clock on a Tuesday
This is exactly why we gather for Prayer on Tuesdays at 11am. It is an unremarkable hour, the middle of a workday in a small town, no crowd, no production. Which makes it a good and honest test of whether we actually believe what we sing on Sunday — that God is here, that He listens, that He moves. Some of the most important things that have happened in this church started in that room at that plain hour.
Remember that Jesus spent roughly thirty years in a workshop and about three in public ministry. God the Son gave the overwhelming majority of His earthly life to sawdust and suppers and family and small-town obligation, and not one of those days was a waste or a warm-up. He was already the beloved Son. He was already about His Father's business.
So is this hour. Hand it over and see.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.