We have resorted to magical categories and overlook God’s gift of sacred significance in the commonplace events of our lives. As a result, we may choose to take a particular job because of what we describe as God’s leading, but then do the job with little or no sense of the sacredness of the work.

We may claim to have God’s leading in our relationships, but then completely ignore the ways in which our words and behavior toward one another diminish a shared sense of God’s presence.

What we need, in other words, are not signs and wonders but a deeper determination to nurture the presence of God in the midst of the commonplace—what Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk, describes as “practicing the presence of God.”

from What God Wants for Your Life