Title: God Hides in Ordinary Moments
Intro: There is something profound in this choice that speaks directly to how God meets us today.
Scripture: Matthew 1:18-24
Reflection
Dear Friends,
There is a question I have been carrying with me lately, and perhaps you have wondered about it too: why does God choose to work in ways that are so easy to miss?
I think about Mary often. A teenage girl in a forgotten village, going about her ordinary life—drawing water, grinding grain, preparing meals, talking with her mother about her upcoming wedding. Nothing spectacular. Nothing that would make the neighbours stop and stare. And yet, in that ordinariness, God was doing something that would change everything forever.
When the angel appeared to her, Mary was not in the temple. She was not fasting on a mountaintop. She was not a prophet or a priest. She was just… Mary. A girl whose name meant “bitterness” in her language, carrying within her the sweetest hope the world would ever know. And I wonder—how many of us are living our own version of Mary’s story right now, carrying something precious that we have not yet recognised because it arrives wrapped in the ordinary?
Matthew’s Gospel tells us simply, “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way” (Matthew 1:18). But think about what those words meant to the people hearing them for the first time. The Jews had been waiting for the Messiah for centuries. They expected thunder and lightning. They expected a warrior-king descending from heaven in blazing glory, landing on the Temple Mount with supernatural power. Their ancient texts spoke of sudden, dramatic intervention.
Instead, God chose nine months of morning sickness. God chose the swelling of a young woman’s belly, the whispers of neighbours, the scandal, and the fear. God chose Joseph’s sleepless nights and Mary’s tears. God chose the human way—slow, vulnerable, utterly dependent.
My friends, there is something profound in this choice that speaks directly to how God meets us today.
Last week, I visited a family in our parish. The mother was exhausted—caring for her ageing mother-in-law, managing three children, and trying to keep up with household responsibilities. “Father,” she said to me, her voice trembling, “I pray every day for God to help me, but I do not see any answer. Nothing changes.”
I looked around her home. I saw her daughter quietly helping her younger brother with homework. I saw her husband washing dishes without being asked. I saw her mother-in-law, despite her frailty, sitting and shelling peas, wanting to contribute something. And I realised—God’s answer was already there, woven into the fabric of her ordinary day. But she was looking for something spectacular, something obvious, and missing the quiet grace already present.
We are all a bit like Jacob, aren’t we? You remember his story from Genesis. He was running away, tired and afraid, using a stone for a pillow in the middle of nowhere. In his sleep, he saw angels ascending and descending on a ladder between heaven and earth. When he woke, he said in astonishment, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it” (Genesis 28:16). God was there all along. Jacob just had not noticed.
The incarnation—God becoming human in Jesus—teaches us that the sacred does not usually arrive with trumpets and fanfare. It arrives in the cry of a newborn, in the tenderness of a mother’s touch, in the faithfulness of a confused fiancé who chooses love over scandal. Joseph could have quietly divorced Mary. The law gave him that right. But Matthew tells us, “Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly” (Matthew 1:19).
Even in his confusion, even in his pain, Joseph’s character shone through. He was kind. He was protective. He was thinking of Mary’s wellbeing, not his own reputation. And it was into this goodness—this ordinary human decency—that God spoke through a dream.
I want you to think about your own life for a moment. What are the ordinary things you do every day that feel insignificant? Making breakfast. Commuting to work. Helping a child with homework. Listening to a friend’s problems. Caring for someone who is sick. Doing the laundry. Paying the bills.
These feel so mundane, don’t they? We wait for God to show up in the big moments—the wedding, the new job, the healing, the miracle. And sometimes God does work in those dramatic ways. But far more often, God is present in the thousand small moments we barely notice. The incarnation tells us that God loves the ordinary. God chose it as the setting for the most extraordinary event in history.
Saint Paul understood this deeply. He wrote to the Athenians, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Not just in church. Not just during prayer time. But in every breath, every heartbeat, every mundane moment of our existence. God is that close. That is present. That is ordinary.
I think about the shepherds too. They were watching their sheep at night—a job they had done countless times before. Same hills. Same stars. Same sheep with their familiar bleating. And suddenly, the ordinary night became the setting for an angelic announcement. But notice—the angels did not stay. They delivered their message and left. And the shepherds had to walk to Bethlehem on their own tired feet, through the same ordinary darkness they knew so well, to find an ordinary baby in an ordinary feeding trough.
The spectacular moment passed quickly. What remained was the ordinary journey, the ordinary search, and the ordinary faith required to keep walking toward something they hoped was true.
That is where we live too, isn’t it? Between the moments of clarity and the long stretches of ordinary time when we are just putting one foot in front of the other, hoping we are heading in the right direction.
There is a Nigerian proverb that says, “Listen, and you will hear the footsteps of the ants.” It reminds us that profound things often happen quietly. God’s voice is not usually in the earthquake or the fire, but in the gentle whisper, as Elijah discovered (1 Kings 19:12). We need to develop ears to hear the quiet, eyes to see the subtle, and hearts to recognise the ordinary ways God moves.
When I was younger, I used to pray for dramatic signs. I wanted God to speak to me clearly, unmistakably. Now, years later, I realise God has been speaking all along—through the friend who called at exactly the right moment, through the scripture that suddenly seemed written just for me, through the unexpected kindness of a stranger, through the sunset that made me stop and remember beauty still exists.
Matthew’s Gospel shows us Joseph receiving God’s message in a dream. Not in the synagogue. Not during prayer. But during sleep—perhaps the most ordinary, vulnerable state we experience every day. And when Joseph woke up, he simply “did as the angel of the Lord commanded him” (Matthew 1:24). He married Mary. He became the earthly father of God’s Son. He worked as a carpenter. He lived an ordinary life made extraordinary by faithfulness.
My dear friends, as we prepare our hearts for Christmas once again, perhaps the greatest gift we can give ourselves is permission to find God in the ordinary. Stop waiting for the burning bush. Look instead at the people across your breakfast table. Listen to the laughter of children playing. Notice the elderly man who smiles at you on the bus. Pay attention to the tiredness in your spouse’s eyes and respond with tenderness.
God chose to enter our world through pregnancy, birth, childhood, family life—all the ordinary stuff of human existence. This means nothing in your life is too mundane to carry the presence of God. Your kitchen can be holy ground. Your workplace can be a temple. Your family dinner table can be an altar.
The question is not whether God is present. The question is: Are we paying attention?
Mary knew first about Jesus’ birth because she was paying attention to her own body, her own life, and her own experience. She did not miss the ordinary miracle happening within her. That is the invitation for each of us—to wake up, like Jacob, and realise, “The Lord is in this place—in this moment, in this relationship, in this struggle, in this joy—and I am just beginning to see it.”
May we all develop the eyes to see and the ears to hear God’s footsteps in the ordinary moments of our lives.
May the heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all. Amen...
