Serving God can be boring. There I said it. This is something that all who are involved in ministry know, but rarely articulate. The boring reality of ministry seems to betray the high hopes with which we accepted our callings. After all, we began our work for God with visions of entering the work of the Spirit, of growing the church, and transforming the world. And yet as time goes on, we find that much of our walk with God is uninteresting. Ministry involves ordinary events like mowing the lawn, baking a cake, or attending yet another budget-related meeting. Is this really what God called us to?

Don’t get me wrong, whenever we step forward in faithfulness and ministry, we participate in God’s work in the world. But this participation often takes place in the most routine and ordinary of ways. Our life of faith, and our work in ministry, never moves from miracle to miracle. For much of the time, serving God is filled with tasks and actions so regular that we might dismiss them as eternally significant.

Have you ever found yourself criticizing your life of faith because it seemed so unabashedly ordinary?  Have you questioned whether God blesses you or your work, simply because you don’t see miraculous displays erupt around you?

It can be tempting to believe that God’s presence and work is revealed only in the spiritually explosive and earth shattering. The ordinary, the regular, and the downright boring, condemn our efforts so that we feel disheartened and frustrated. And so, we search to find the miraculous and the sublime. We chase the feeling of exultation and delight, “a God-high”, instead of noticing where God reveals the Spirit amid the tasks and demands of regular existence.

But our life with God is not always exciting, and ministry is not always filled with effusions of blessings poured out in dramatic ways. Serving God is frequently routine, and often boring. 

Take Mose’s call to the ministry as an example. Moses’ call to ministry is surrounded in the ordinary.  When Moses set is called from the burning bush, he wasn’t looking for, nor expecting, anything miraculous to take place. His call occurred on an ordinary day, as he led ordinary sheep to an ordinary pasture. We might know Mount Hor as the “mountain of God” but for Moses, it was simply the mountain on the far side of the wilderness. Mount Hor was a place he had been to countless times before; it was routine and safe.

Moses’ ministry didn’t fare much better. Think about, what does God invite Moses to do? Despite how dramatically his call is depicted in movies, Moses is asked lead Israel from point A to point B. Yes, miracles would occur during his time, but between dramatic stories were years, sometimes decades, of non-events. More than anything, Moses ministry involved the routine action of simply putting one foot in front of the other. And yet in those routine moments, in those boring places, he often met with the living God.

There are times where God comes in miraculous ways, in burning bushes and pillars of fire; we may even be graced to experience a few of these moments. But these things don’t occur all the time. The lack of the extraordinary doesn’t negate the God’s presence or work within us. If we chase after God-highs and miraculous moments, we potentially miss God’s presence in the simplicity of this moment, and this place. Furthermore, we set ourselves, and our ministries, up for failure, because we inadvertently suggest that God is uninterested in regular people or regular events.

Scripture is replete with examples of God showing up amidst the ordinary. We see this in Jacob’s vision of the angelic ladder; it occurs when David is plucked from obscurity to be a mighty king; most profoundly it occurs in the incarnation. God dwells in the boring and the routine. It is in the hum-drum places of life that we are invited to meet the living God.  

As you go about your day, may you remain open and observant to the flicker of God all around you. May you dare to believe that this moment, with whatever it holds, is a time of divine encounter. Our walk with God, and the ministries we take up, is more about joining God in the everyday work of the kingdom, rather than the few miracles we might experience along the way.

It’s true; serving God can be boring, but it’s always glorious.