The past couple of days has been, well, ordinary. But even in the ordinariness of life, amidst the mundane routines and the uneventfulness of the days, there are still thoughts to be gathered and spiritual lessons to be learned.

Some years ago, I remember having gone through a journey of seeking something spectacular every day (primarily because this was how I was taught to view my Christian life). Without the daily attainment of this "something special", it felt like my Christian walk was weak and uneventful; that somehow, God was far away. Perhaps I just wasn't doing enough to allow God's presence to fill my life, or perhaps I was just closed to what the Holy Spirit was trying to do in my life. Or maybe I had just pressed the wrong button or applied the wrong formula, and everyone knows that when you don't get it right, the Holy Spirit just doesn't show up!

Dry spells, we call them; when life is uneventful and nothing spectacular takes place. When you dwell in a state of ordinariness. And because of what I had learned then, I had to somehow try to "create" that intimacy all over again, to assure myself that I was all right and that God was not as far as I thought he was. I needed to know I wasn't abandoned. But the more I tried to engineer his presence through prayer, fasting, and countless other disciplines, the more miserable I got. God didn't show up.

Disillusionment set in. Maybe I was just one of the spiritual outcasts who'd never taste the sweet presence of God in my life. It was intriguing how some people could be so excited about God all the time, how they could easily "fall" when they were prayed for, how they easily expressed themselves when they participated in the corporate worship of their communities, and how they openly prayed in such volumous voices. I mean, God seemed so real to these people! And I? I'd ever been in a prayer meeting where everyone who was prayed for was "slain in the Spirit" (as they call it), whereas I was the only one left standing. Something was wrong with me!

There was only one way out for me - that was to give up. And to start from scratch all over again. Perhaps I had been expecting God to show up in certain ways and to perform in accordance with certain expectation of visibility. And now, it was time for me to learn to allow God to show up in ways that he wanted to, and for me to learn to recognise these ways by which he had made himself known.

That was then.

Today, it's an ordinary day. And I'm at rest. Because God has left his vestigia Dei (footprints of God) everywhere... all over my world and all over my life. Everyone I meet seems to be confronting me with an image of Christ. Every blade of grass I tread upon seems to shimmer with the unspoken creative powers of an ever-abiding presence. There is life all around me, and I know that the Spirit of God is the Spirit of life. Where there is life, I know, there is God's power to sustain the existence of life.

It's such an ordinary day, and God is just as present as any other ordinary day. I've lost the desire to seek anything beyond the depth of this day, because this is where I have found my God... in the ordinariness of life. My soul is at rest. How spectacular.