COUNTED

June - August 2025

In the church calendar, more than half of the year is given over to “Ordinary Time.” Coming from the word ordinal, which means “counted,” this time is far from a mere placeholder between holidays. We are urged to count each day, each hour, each minute like precious stones on an altar. Indeed, these "small bits" make up the "sites of our worship," as Tish Harrison Warren puts it.

Yet, this simple call is not an easy one. It is often hard to recognize the moments of our days, filled with miscellaneous and routine tasks, as the holy ground where we encounter God. And while life is punctuated with extraordinary and defining moments, we live in the ordinary and average, day in and day out. Whether it is due to sheer boredom from the monotony or sheer exhaustion from our burdens, we forget to notice the everyday glories which are teeming over in praise to their creator. How do we begin to have the ears to hear, the vision to notice, and the courage to join their song? 

As Warren puts it, “some of most astonishing gifts are the most easily overlooked.” This season, we will seek to cast our eyes, once again, to what’s in front of us — at the glories found in the ordinary, the plain stuff that fills our schedules, our closets, and our worries — and not stopping there, but seeing through them to what Grand Story they participate in. It may, possibly, be only then that we can genuinely have the capacity to revel in the lilies of the field while not diminishing the reality of our pains and struggles. For only in the narrative of Christ’s cosmic story do both aptly fit In this season, we will focus on what “ordinary” truly is (and what it isn’t) and lean into each site of worship, no matter how routine, humdrum, simple, awful, or awesome it is. 

For this is the day the Lord has made. 

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Quotes taken from Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (InterVarsity Press, 2016)

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