Once Upon a Time I signed up to work as a camp counselor in Savannah, Georgia during one of the hottest summers on record. My job would be working with older children, spearheading various programs, and playing the guitar during daily Mass.
On my first day on the job, however, my vision of sitting
around bonfires and singing camp songs was shattered when we were informed that
first we had to clean the camp facilities (dormitories, mess hall,
kitchen, bathrooms, and classrooms) from top to bottom to make it ready
for the campers. You can imagine the mold, spider webs, nests, and
dirt which had accumulated since the previous summer, and we had several days
of hard work ahead of us. Before long I was standing in a bathroom stall
holding a toilet brush (and my breath) and decidedly grumpy about the whole
thing. The summer ahead no longer shined so brightly.
But later that night, as I read quietly while the cicadas
droned outside, I realized that grumpiness and bad attitude are not only
exhausting, but hard work. I was reminded of Catherine Marshall's book, A Man
Called Peter, in which she tells the story of her husband, Peter
Marshall, who came to this country as a poor, Scottish immigrant but who
eventually became Chaplain of the United States Senate. During the course of
his life Peter wrote some truly wonderful sermons, but there was one in
particular I was thinking about that night in Savannah: The importance of
finding God in the ordinariness of our daily lives.
Peter truly believed it was important "to make the distinction between
worship and work and play less sharp", and that we should seek God in our
kitchen, on the playground, and in our typewriter. He wrote that our lives
would have absolutely no meaning if we weren't able to see God in the mundane,
day-to-day chores that make up our lives; that sometimes what we need
most "is the God of the humdrum... the commonplace . . . the
everyday."
That next morning, as I faced yet another day of cleaning bathrooms,
I took inspiration from Peter Marshall’s sermon and would try to
look for God in those dirty, smelly, disgusting camp bathrooms.
So I prayed for the grace to do this job willingly and with
a joyful heart. I gathered my cleaning supplies and wandered
through a small auditorium where I found an old record player and ONE
scratchy record -- Louis Armstrong singing It's a Wonderful World -- and set it
up in the hallway outside the bathrooms.
I listened to that record over and over again at full volume as I scrubbed
those toilets. I sang along. My fellow counselors then joined in. We scrubbed
those toilets, laughed, talked about everything and nothing, and danced wearing
rubber gloves on our hands and waving toilet brushes in the air.
And there, in those muggy, dirty camp bathrooms, we were
insanely happy.
We had found God in the humdrum and mundane. We had found Him in the ordinary.
