March 2022 Mobile Monthly Mission Challenge

By Kat Silverglate, Founder Copyright 2022.

I’m sitting on the floor in an Air B&B caring for my granddaughter in the middle of 2022’s now infamous snowmageddon. It’s just the two of us. When we aren’t on the floor mastering the crawl, we’re blasting music and dancing like maniacs in circles around every inch of the rental unit. OK, she can’t walk yet, so I dance like a goof ball while she’s strapped to my torso with some miracle cloth contraption that allows her to face out in the direction I’m moving. Her hands and feet are free, dangling and swinging as we go.

The Hokey Pokey. Five Little Monkeys. The Wheels on the Bus. Over and over again, we sing the same songs. Over and over again, we cover each room in the dwelling place. When the playlist ends, I stop moving. She cranes her neck back and looks up into my eyes. Her expression says it all: “Let’s do it again Mama Kat!”

And so, we do.

Here's what’s different about my romp around the postage stamp size dwelling place and hers. Monotony doesn’t seem to be a thing for her. Not yet anyway. No matter how many times we cover the same square footage, she delights in something new. We pass the dining room mirror for the umpteenth time while she squeals at our faces as if she’s never seen them before. She grabs a low hanging scarf as we pass the coat rack again and starts to waive it like a band conductor. Pausing by the window, I see her right hand moving gleefully and her eyes locked on to something on the other side of the glass. She’s trying to say “hello” to the stranger shoveling snow. He’s absorbed by his task. She keeps waiving until her tiny hand moves into her field of vision. And then, she’s transported. Riveted. Awestruck. Taken with the miracle of her wiggly digits.

When the music stops this time, she doesn’t look up. She’s sleepy. It’s nap time. But now I’m fully awake. I want to do one more round so I can practice this discipline of noticing the miraculous in the ordinary. I want to find joy in the places I roam repetitively. Casually. To be awake to the miraculous in the familiar.

G.K. Chesterton, in his classically whimsical and ever rhetorical prose, muses about our tendency to become desensitized to the miraculous in the familiar. To blame our malaise or fear of missing out on monotony and repetition. To wonder where God is in what we dare call the mundane.

… when they [children] find some game or joke that they specially enjoy… a child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life… They always say, “Do it again;” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got[ten] tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton, page 92 (as reprinted in 2009 by Moody Publishers Chicago; original 1908 Dodd, Mead & Co.)

Don’t you love that challenging phrase – strong enough to exult in monotony? How he turns monotony inside out and exposes the ridiculously divine presence of the Lord in things the world might call ordinary? Pedestrian? Ho Hum?

Few verses meet Chesterton’s rhetoric more head on than Psalm 23. While we often focus on the miracle of God’s presence in the dark valley of hardship or in the green pasture of refreshment, the Psalmist doesn’t skip the middle ground. Instead, he celebrates the everyday miracle of God’s regular romp with us on His paths. His right paths. 

The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me… Psalm 23:1-4

Green pastures and God-with-me valleys are on equal footing with the daily path walk. He celebrates the miracle of “no lack” because of God’s constant presence in the postage stamp size of his one ridiculous life. He sees the miraculous in all of it. 

Which leads us to our Mobile Mission this month. First, the inspiration and permission for the mission activity this month came from the president of my writing group, Joan Farley. In her book about a widower raising his teen daughter after the death of his wife (still in the works), she introduces a game the family played before the mom died – Looking for God. During the day, each family member kept a little log of the moments they saw God in their daily, ordinary walk. At night, over dinner, they shared their lists. The grieving daughter decides to play the game again as a way to honor her mom. It helps her through grief.

Farley’s fictional characters are essentially doing what Chesterton dares us to do. They are CHECKING their unspoken CLAIMS of monotony by exulting in the miraculous. They are looking for God on the path He set them on. On their daily path with Him. They are looking for and finding the miraculous in the familiar of the daily grind.

So, our mission this month is called “Claim Check.” In your mission pack, you will find a literal claim check -- one you might receive when you check your winter coat at a restaurant or turn your car over to a valet at a hotel. Each one has a unique number. And each one has that traditional language one finds on a claim check – “IN CASE OF ANY LOSS, CLAIM BEFORE LEAVING, NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING LEFT OVER NIGHT.”

Here's how we plan to walk out this month’s mission. All month long, we are going to check our unspoken claims of monotony, of ordinary, of ho hum. Each day, we’ll jot down notes of the moments we saw God in our ordinary routines. In the evening, we’ll find someone to share our list with. A spouse. A friend. A co-worker. You can even share it with us at [email protected]. We’d so love that!

Keep that claim check in a visible place. Let it remind you to CHECK YOUR UNSPOKEN CLAIM that the miraculous is somehow absent from your familiar routines. Hidden on your daily path with God. Think about that little warning on the CLAIM CHECK! When we leave our claims of monotony unchallenged at the end of the day, we often lose our memory of the miraculous. We forget the tender details of God’s intimate presence with us.