Today's Challenge: Look for the divine within the ordinary trials of you...

Today's Quotation:

The "trials of ordinary existence" are the divine curricula for spiritual maturity.

Skye Jethani

Today's Meditation:

It is difficult to imagine how many opportunities I have squandered in life to learn and gain invaluable spiritual wisdom, simply because I was looking for something extraordinary. There is endless sacredness and beauty present all around us at every ordinary moment of our lives--in our family, friends, and neighbors, in songs and laughter, in the rushing brook, throughout all of nature and the expanse of the universe.

It becomes quite easy for us to ignore the ordinary, perhaps because we have seen it all before and it seems so understandable. The flowers bloom every year, so what is the big deal? Yet we are wrong... those blooms are not the same blooms as they were last year, or the year before. The world around us truly is holy, from the very next person that we will run into... to the flowers and trees, birds and animals... to the infinite amount of matter spread out throughout this massive universe. And until we are able to see each creation in its own sacred and unique right, we will fail to understand and to learn the "divine curricula" they speak to us.

From the food on our tables, to the falling snow and rain, to the smile of a child, to the comforting embrace of a caring friend--each and every creation is an extraordinary, unique, and holy creation of God, just as I am. And by recognizing the sacredness around us, and allowing ourselves to focus our awareness on it, we allow our lives to become much richer.

Today's Challenge: Look for the divine within the ordinary trials of your life today.

Questions to consider:

How rich do you feel your life to be? What are some of the sacred things in your life?

Does failing to notice the sacredness in the ordinary rob us of our riches? How might being able to see the divine in the ordinary existence of life add to them?

Is sacredness reserved for saints, priests, and pastors? Why do we tend to feel that they somehow have better access to the sacred?

For further thought:

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, whatever stirs this mortal frame, all are but ministers of love, and feed his sacred flame.

Hartley Coleridge