SUNDAY MORNING: This week, talking about all the literally hundreds of items that need to get checked off the huge (and growing) “to-do” list Rebekah and I have going on, someone threw out the idiomatic expression, “The Devil is in the details….”

Typically, even though I’m a writer, I tend to appreciate cliches. Words or phrases become cliches because they work, so there’s definitely a place for them in routine communication.

But, “The Devil is in the details” runs counter to my functional theology, so I’m going to substitute the following instead, both as a prayer request and as a alternative idea; here it is: “May God be in all the details.”

GOD IN THE DETAILS: Too often, as people of faith, we tend to limit our prospective apprehension of the Creator to the grandiose, looking for a “pillar of fire,” a “parting of the Red Sea,” or a golden chariot swooping down to save the day. However, the longer I live, and the more deliberately I apply myself to this contemplative spiritual life, then the more often I witness God in the details, the supposedly insignificant, the mundane, the run-of-the-mill.

• Just yesterday morning, for example, while I was walking Scout, I glanced up to see some delicate shades of color emerge across the golf course as the morning light began to pour in over the horizon: “God is in the light,” I thought to myself. “God is light.”
• Then, mowing the lawn, the smell of fresh-cut grass grabbed at my senses and teased my memory. I found myself smiling, and I realized that God was there.
• In the afternoon, wheeling a stack of book-boxes on the handcart from Rebekah’s church office to the SUV, I could picture myself wheeling some of those same books in the other direction, almost 17 years ago, and a warm feeling spread all over my spirit and I understood that God has been with us, so profoundly, in every detail along the way.
• Mid afternoon I stopped by the barber’s for a haircut, and the stylist shared some of her family story and the pain that defines her brother’s life. When I left I took her hand and told her, “I’ll pray for Shamus,” and I did. Just a small detail, but God was most certainly there.

HOUR BY HOUR: And so the day progressed, and likewise every day of our lives moves forward, through time and into the potential for significance, and the key variable is the question of our inviting God into the details – or simply letting it all drift by, one meaningless moment following another….

This view (left) has been a part of my early morning pretty-much every day for 17 years. It looks to me like an invitation, an invitation to embrace the opportunity to not only appreciate the light, but to step into the light, and to invite the source of all light and life to inhabit every single detail of the coming day.

Because, if God is in the details, then there’s really no room for anything other than blessing – DEREK