Noticing God at Home

One of my favorite things to imagine is Jesus and the disciples in their day to day life. I think about this often, because the disciples were the closest to knowing Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom I worship and follow. The call of Christianity is to figure out what it means to worship and follow Christ, and I can think of no better place to look than the community of Jesus and the disciples.

The disciples literally chose to live with Jesus. Have you ever had a roommate? I wonder sometimes if Jesus was ever running late to synagogue, leaving sprawling parchments across the dining room table, yelling to the disciples that he promised to tidy them up when they got back home. And if he was leaving behind parchments, he probably didn’t have time to do the dishes either.  

I wonder what it was like to travel with Jesus, especially on foot. Have you ever traveled with someone? You know how sometimes the people we love more than life itself can get on our nerves while we are on a long trip? I imagine what traveling with Jesus was like, any tensions being multiplied by the fact that they were on foot, obviously without air conditioning, and unable to distract themselves with a great album or comedy podcast from whatever fractures naturally occurring in their friendships.

And I wonder what it was like for the disciples to watch him die. Have you ever grieved the death of someone you love? I imagine them wandering back home, shocked by the grief of it all, only to trip over one of Jesus’ messy piles of parchment then collapse into tears. I wonder who cleaned the dishes he left behind, knowing he would never make it home to be a better roommate. 

One of the ways the disciples worshiped God in Christ was to simply be with him, live alongside him. We, too, are invited to understand our worship as an act of being with Jesus, living alongside him, even in the very ordinary and mundane realities of life.

When we look into the lives of Priscilla and Aquila, we find this same devotion. They were missionaries who were close with Paul; he even described them as “fellow workers in Christ Jesus” in Romans. I love, in this artistic depiction of them, how they are showing us the mundane realities of life.  They are living together, and their days are seemingly full of tasks like writing and tent making, while children and chicken wander around at their feet. It is not like the grandiose icons of saints we often receive.  No, this is a depiction of the simple holiness that comes to us in daily life. Priscilla and Aquila serve to remind us that our everyday lives are beautiful, because within them, we find our community with the likes of all the saints, and Jesus Christ himself.

Like the disciples who lived with Jesus, and Priscilla and Aquila who lived with Paul, we, too, can find holiness, worship, and the nearer presence of God through simply noticing how God meets us in the many homes where we dwell.