Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life > Status Update

Our communal practice of confession reminds us that failure in the Christian life is the norm. We – – each and all – – take apart and gathered worship as unworthy people who, left on our own, deserve God’s condemnation. But we are not left on our own.

God searches more earnestly for me, than I do for my keys.

Repentance and faith are the constant, daily rhythms of the Christian life, our breathing out and breathing in.

It’s not enough to merely want to be more content or to tell myself to cheer up. I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ and the small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, encountering, Christ, death, and resurrection – – this big story of brokenness and redemption – – in a small, Grey, stir crazy Tuesday morning.
(Phil. 2:14)

The call to contentment is a call against the concrete circumstances. I find myself in today. I need to find joy and reject despair in the moment that I’m in, in the midst of small pressures and needling anxieties.
(Phil. 4:11)

Underneath these overreactions and aggravations lie true fears. My lost keys revealed my anxiety that I won’t be able to do what I need to do to take care of myself and those around me.

And it exposes my idolatry of ease, my false hope, and comfort and convenience – – “ I just want things to always run smoothly.”

So I will fight against my bodies, falling this. I will care for it as best as I can, knowing that my body is secret, and that caring, for it is a holy act.

When you can’t find words to pray, you can kneel down.

When We degenerate our bodies, whether through neglect, or staring at our faces, and counting up our flaws.-we are belittling. A secret site, a worship space, more wonders than the most glorious, ancient Cathedral. We are standing before the Grand Canyon, or the 16 chapel, and rolling our eyes.

Because of Christ’s embodiment, the ways we care for our bodies are not meaningless necessities that keep us well enough to do the real work of worship & discipleship. Instead, the small task of caring for our bodies, act as an embodied confession that our Creator, who mysteriously became flesh, has made our bodies well and deserves worship in and through our very cells, muscles, tissues, & teeth.