God In the Reheated Coffee
By the time I realize my coffee has gone cold, I’ve usually already reheated it once.
It’s sitting behind my laptop while I answer an email, check a serving schedule, remember the lesson needs another discussion question, and wonder whether anyone signed up to bring dessert to HomeGroup. At home there’s laundry in the dryer, the dishwasher is full, and my carefully written to-do list has been overtaken by people who need to be listened to, cared for, prayed with, or reminded that they’re not alone.
Loving people is the work. I know that. Still, inside the tornado of thoughts in my head, I begin to feel as though the small things I’m doing can’t possibly be enough. I get lost in the minutiae and forget there isn’t a detail God finds insignificant. Then I begin overthinking and striving, trying to hold every loose end together while my attention settles everywhere except on the Lord.
Oh, what a fickle mind I have, and how often I allow it to drive the worship of my heart.
I want to sit in the beauty of the little parts of a job, including the chores that feel boring and the acts of service no one notices. Making a bed, wiping a counter, setting out chairs, answering an email, and finding enough clean forks for a room full of people can all become ways of loving those who live in our homes and those we welcome into them.
God is present in the work, even when the coffee needs reheating again.
I think that is why the companion for this 6th week of the Becoming series, Brother Lawrence, has become important in reminding me to and for whom my worship and worship are for. And how I am form through the ordinary.
This is where Brother Lawrence meets me – my companion from the kitchen.
Brother Lawrence was born Nicolas Herman in Lorraine in the early seventeenth century. He came of age during the Thirty Years’ War, a brutal conflict that devastated the region where he lived. His family’s poverty left him with very few choices, and military service offered the possibility of food and survival. War would leave him injured and permanently affected by what he had witnessed.
As a young man during his service, he looked at a bare winter tree and considered how leaves, flowers, and fruit would return in their season. In that ordinary sight, he encountered the providence and power of God. The God who could bring life back to bare branches could also transform a human heart.
After leaving military life, Nicolas worked for a time as a servant. He later entered a Discalced Carmelite community in Paris as a lay brother and took the name Lawrence of the Resurrection. He wasn’t a celebrated preacher or a formally trained theologian. He spent many years working in the community kitchen and later repaired sandals. His days were filled with repetitive tasks, physical pain, continual interruptions, and the ordinary needs of other people.
That part of his story matters to me. Brother Lawrence didn’t arrive in the kitchen untouched by suffering, naturally peaceful, and already skilled at holy awareness. He brought war, trauma, injury, awkwardness, fear, and years of inner struggle with him. The practice we now associate with his name wasn’t the result of an easy life. It was the way he learned to return to God in the life he actually had.
The Practice of the Presence of God was compiled after his death from letters, spiritual teachings, conversations, and recollections. His wisdom was preserved because people encountered a man whose ordinary life had become quietly saturated with God.
Brother Lawrence wrote that we should firmly establish ourselves in the presence of God and speak with him continually. He believed there was no act too small to offer in love. He could turn food in a pan for the love of God, then worship when the work was done. He said it was enough to pick up even a piece of straw from the ground out of love for God.
What a beautiful way of approaching worship.
In the noise and clutter of the kitchen, with several people calling for different things at once, Brother Lawrence believed he could remain as near to God as he was during formal prayer. His kitchen didn’t have to become quiet before it could become holy.
Honestly, that sounds less like a monastery kitchen and more like Young Adult HomeGroups on a Monday night.
The Sacred Ordinary - I’d known Brother Lawrence’s name for years, but he came into clearer view for me through Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life. Her line, “Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes,” has stayed with me because it exposes something true about the way many of us approach formation.
We want the life-changing retreat, the powerful worship moment, the deep revelation, and the dramatic breakthrough. We’re less excited about the repeated practices that slowly make room for those changes to take root. We push back against the ordinary because we think it means unimportant.
Yet the ordinary is where most of our lives happen, and it’s where much of our becoming happens. We’re formed while making the bed, doing the dishes, praying for the person who frustrates us, opening Scripture again, apologizing again, and choosing faithfulness in work that won’t be applauded.
Repetition is often the soil where transformation grows.
I read Liturgy of the Ordinary during the year PJ died. Grief had changed the shape of time. Some moments were unbearably sharp, while others felt strangely dull and disconnected. I knew God was present in the deepest pain because I needed him there with a desperation I couldn’t hide. What I’d lost sight of was that he was also present in the everyday moments that annoyed me.
He was there in the dishes that still needed washing when the world had ended. He was there in the bed that needed making after another night of broken sleep. He was there in the laundry, the grocery list, the brushing of teeth, and all the tiny signs that life was continuing when I wasn’t sure how to continue with it.
Those ordinary acts began to feel like small moments of order-making. Every day, the bed becomes unmade, the dishes become dirty, and the laundry basket fills again. We keep bringing order to what has become disordered. It isn’t the same as God speaking creation into being, but it can echo his care for the world. We gather what’s scattered, wash what’s soiled, make room at the table, and prepare a place for someone to rest.
That realization shifted my relationship with chores, worship, and gratitude. It didn’t make me enjoy every task, but it helped me see that the work in front of me might hold more love than I’d noticed.
Another companion in this has been Every Moment Holy, with its liturgies for work, waiting, loss, celebration, and all the unnoticed spaces between. It’s helped me recognize that thin places aren’t only found in beautiful landscapes or at the holy thresholds of birth and death. Sometimes the veil feels thin over a sink full of dishes because I’ve finally stopped resisting the moment long enough to notice that God is already there.
But what happens when the next right step vanishes?
Almost ten years later, this isn’t easier. In some ways, it’s harder. Menopause, grief, changed family relationships, and a late-life ADHD diagnosis have all affected the way I begin, organize, remember, and move through ordinary work. I went from being ordered and rigid to sometimes standing in the middle of a room unable to identify the first step. My default now is to see every task all at once, which somehow results in being able to begin none of them.
The laundry needs to be moved, an email needs an answer, the lesson needs editing, the counter needs clearing, and there’s something I walked into the room to find. I don’t remember what it was, but I’m fairly certain it was important.
Then I notice my coffee.
Or, more accurately, I remember that coffee exists and that I made some several hours ago. I find it somewhere near the place I was working before I got distracted by a different task that reminded me of another task. I reheat it, set it down, and promptly forget it again.
At this point, reheating my coffee isn’t an inconvenience. It’s practically part of my spiritual rule of life.
There’s humor in that, but there’s also grief. It’s hard when things that once felt simple no longer feel simple. It’s hard to look at your own scattered thoughts and not interpret them as laziness, carelessness, or failure. Shame is quick to enter the room and offer its own explanation. It tells me that I should be able to do this, that other people manage it without trouble, and that my difficulty beginning means something is wrong with my character.
Then shame creates even more paralysis. The task becomes tangled with all the things I believe it says about me, and suddenly I’m not just folding laundry. I’m trying to prove that I’m responsible, competent, faithful, and worthy of being trusted.
That’s far too much weight for a basket of towels to carry.
God, through the example of shaping the life of Brother Lawrence, offers mercy here because practicing being present with Him isn’t another perfect routine to fail at. It isn’t a system for making sure our thoughts never wander. It isn’t reserved for people with quiet houses, flawless morning habits, matching storage containers, and color-coded prayer journals.
His practice was a returning.
When his mind wandered, he brought it back. When he failed, he acknowledged it without collapsing into despair, then resumed his conversation with God. He didn’t treat distraction as proof that God had left. He treated it as another invitation to turn toward him.
This is deeply good news for those of us who may need to return thirty times in thirty minutes.
The prayer can be as simple as, “Lord, show me the next right step.” It can be, “Help me love well through this chore.” It can be, “Thank you that I have this bed to make.” It can be, “Help me answer this message with grace,” or “Meet me here because my mind feels too loud to find you.”
Sometimes, practicing God’s presence means noticing him as you complete the task. Sometimes it means asking him for the grace to begin. Sometimes it means accepting that the faithful thing is to complete one small part rather than shaming ourselves for not accomplishing the entire list.
The apostle Paul writes:
“And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Colossians 3:17
Whatever you do is wonderfully inconvenient language. It won’t allow us to divide life neatly into sacred work and meaningless work. Paul doesn’t say to do only the visible, influential, or explicitly religious things in the name of Jesus. Our words and deeds, our public ministry and hidden service, our teaching and cleaning, our prayer and planning can all be gathered into worship.
This doesn’t mean every item carries equal urgency, or that we should use spiritual language to justify overwork. Practicing God’s presence doesn’t mean pretending we have no limits. Sometimes the faithful next step is to stop, rest, ask for help, or leave something unfinished. The point isn’t to accomplish everything. It’s to remain with him in what love is asking of us now.
Psalm 16:8 says, “I always let the LORD guide me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.” That guidance can come in the middle of a ministry night when the plan changes because a person needs care. It can come while I’m standing in the church hallway, mentally rearranging a dozen details. It can come when I find my coffee cold and realize the conversation that distracted me was more important than the drink.
First Corinthians 10:31 makes the ordinary even more explicit: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.” Eating, drinking, washing, folding, typing, driving, setting up, and cleaning afterward can become places of communion. Not because the tasks themselves are magical, but because God is already present and we’re learning to notice.
So, how can we practice this in small ways?
This week, choose one ordinary task you do most days. Don’t choose the most meaningful task or the one you think sounds spiritual enough. Choose the one that’s repeated, necessary, and easy to overlook.
Attach a short prayer to it.
While washing dishes, pray, “Lord, make me clean and whole.”
While driving, pray, “Jesus, go before me.”
When opening your email, pray, “Lord, help me respond with grace.”
While folding laundry, pray, “Clothe me with compassion.”
When making the bed, pray, “Thank you for giving me a place to rest.”
When reheating your coffee, pray, “Thank you for meeting me here again.”
You don’t need to feel especially spiritual. You don’t need to concentrate perfectly. Your thoughts will scatter, the phone will ring, the list will grow, and the coffee will probably get cold again. (I mean, if you’re life me – this pattern will be on play and repeat all day!)
When you notice, return without shame.
You might also try asking one simple question at the beginning of the day: “Lord, where can I practice your presence today?” Then, at the end of the day, consider where you noticed him. Maybe it was in a meaningful conversation. Maybe it was while setting out chairs, washing a cup, sitting in traffic, or choosing not to send the first version of an irritated email.
The kitchen can become a sanctuary, the hallway a place of prayer, and the unfinished list a reminder that you were never meant to be limitless. Becoming isn’t only happening in the moments you’d describe as deeply spiritual. It’s also happening as you gather what’s scattered, care for what’s been entrusted to you, and return to God in the work already waiting in front of your hands.
So, choose one small task. Attach one small prayer. Practice one small return.
Then, when you forget, begin again.
You might also like other posts from this series:
Intro: Beauty in the Bruise
Part 1: When Restlessness is Really Homesickness
Part 2: All Shall Be Well: Even Here
Part 3: Shaken But Not Overcome
Part 4: Prayers From the Edge of Goodbye
Part 5: The Greening Grace of God
Part 5: God In the Reheated Coffee
Photo by Yasaman Yp on Unsplash
