SEASONS | RESOURCES

Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time is the long season of learning to follow the way of Jesus in the everyday. After the celebrations, feasts, and dramatic turns of the Christian story, we return to familiar streets, regular routines, shared meals, work, neighbors, and all the seemingly small moments where a life is actually formed. Ordinary Time reminds us that most of life happens here and God is here too.

“How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life.”

— Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary

ABOUT THE SEASON

Ordinary Time is the longest season of the liturgical year. Its color is green: the color of growth, life, and things slowly becoming what they were made to be.

There are no forty days to count down. No candles to light each week. No great feast waiting just around the corner.

There is simply life.

Jesus walking from town to town. Meals around tables. Questions from strangers. Stories told along roadsides. Sick people brought by friends. Children welcomed. Arguments with religious leaders. Boats, fields, weddings, grief, bread, fish, and ordinary people learning a different way to live. Ordinary Time invites us into that same slow apprenticeship.

It reminds us that formation rarely happens all at once. We become people of love through the thousand small ways we practice love. We become people who know our neighbors by learning names, showing up again, sharing meals, paying attention, staying curious, and choosing to remain present to a place.

The ordinary is not something we need to escape in order to find God. It is where we learn to notice God.

RESOURCES FOR ORDINARY TIME

Rhythms

Ordinary Time invites us to be rooted. To walk the same streets. Shop at the same stores. Sit on the same porch. Learn the names of the people we regularly pass. Watch the seasons slowly change around the places we call home. These rhythms are an invitation to resist the idea that meaningful life is always somewhere else and instead become more present to the people and places already around us.

Prayer for Noticing & Naming

Father in Heaven,
Our genesis is with Your instruction
To notice and name
And join You in the holy work of nomenclature.

May we accept Your invitation to notice and name
That You are in this place.

May noticing be an act of worship.
May naming be an act of blessing.

May we notice our shared humanity
And name both the triumphs of human hearts,
And the tragedies of our human condition.
May we notice epiphanies of Your colorful Creation

And name each day what is good, true, and beautiful
In our neighbors and neighborhoods.

May we notice the sacredness of the people around us,
And name our ancestors who lived faithful lives
Of service and sacrifice on this soil.

May we be witnesses each day of the divine mysteries
Noticing and naming Your mercy, love, and grace.

May noticing and naming form
Our minds to be curious,
Our hearts to be compassionate,
And our souls to be curates—
As we seek Your will
And follow Your Way.

Amen.

Prayers

Featured

For Those Entrusted with Animals and Land

Creator and Good Shepherd,

You made the creatures we tend and the ground beneath their feet.
Before they belonged to our farms, businesses, or tables,
they belonged to You.

Stewardship

Lord God,

We pause in this moment to give You worthy recognition
For Your supreme sovereignty over all things.
We offer both acknowledgment and gratitude
For Your attentive, providential love and care
That You extend to us each day.

Growing Affection

Dear God,
There are so many ordinary ways
To give and receive your love.

From the cuddles of our kids.
From the laughter of a dear friend.
From holding the hand of a spouse.

Teach me today
To give and receive
Your love as a neighbor.

End of Summer

Father in Heaven,

With August’s arrival,
The morning sunlight beams
Come later through the windows.

May we rest in your great faithfulness,
Remember that your steadfast love never ceases;
And Your mercies never come to an end.

Kids in Summer

Father in Heaven,

Hear our prayer for Your children
During this summer season.
May summer not be a prolonged season of isolation,
But one of generous invitation to
Play dates and sleepovers,
Camping trips and day camps,
Pool parties and birthday parties.

A Blessing for Tables

God of Welcome,
I dedicate my table to You.
You are kind.
You are good.
You are beautiful.

I ask that I would receive You
In the generosity of kinship gathered around my table.

Before Fly Fishing

Before you pulled us from the dust,
Before there was dust,
You spoke into the primordial stew,
And drew the waters back
To craft dry land.

Sleeping Under the Stars

Father in Heaven,
Sleeping under the stars,
beneath this wide and holy canopy,
may we be filled with wonder.

Joy That Flickers

Dear Holy Flame,
If ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’, (thank you, Emily Dickinson)
Then Joy is the thing that flickers!

Care

Thank you for the caregivers in our lives.
For those who make us feel noticed, seen, and loved.
For the spouse who made our breakfast.
For the friend who follows up with a text.
For the neighbor who brings in a package.
For the barista who remembers our name.
For the stranger who extends an act of care.

Sound

You are invited to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and listen.

When we wake into God’s vast creation,
May we listen and pay attention to what we hear:
birds chirping, water running, wind rushing—
but also what we don’t want to hear:
traffic, construction, alerts, and alarms.

Noticing & Naming

Father in Heaven,
Our genesis is with Your instruction
To notice and name
And join You in the holy work of nomenclature.

Neighbors

Father,
You have shown us from the beginning
Your Story is the story of God, People, and Place.
May we see our neighbors and neighborhood
As hallowed gifts and holy ground.
Thank you for inviting us into the sacred story
Of Your extravagant love and endless grace.

Remembrance: Julia Greeley

Father in Heaven,
We come before You today with gratitude
For the life of Your servant, Julia Greeley.

We thank You for the protection of her body—
Even through the pain
Of enslavement, scarring, sickness, and struggle,
She endured and carried out the call You assigned her.

Mayors

Father in Heaven,
Thank you for our city.
We love our city.
You love our city.

You are the one who raises up leaders.
All authority comes from You. (Romans 13:1)
Today, we pray for our mayor.

Dirt

Glory be to God for Dirt—

For backyard soil
as dark and dense
as the midnight sky.
And for all the creatures
who make this ground
their earthy home—
the wiggly ones
and leggy ones
and the tiny ones
our eyes can’t see.

Summer is a season of consistent unplanned interactions with neighbors. It is an ideal season to practice creating a neighborhood map to learn the names, history, and hopes of your neighbors.

Dave Runyon and Jay Pathak wrote the winsome book on loving your neighbor called, “The Art of Neighboring.” In it is a simple, but profound, practice to begin knowing your neighbors. It is creating a Neighborhood Map in the shape of a tic-tac-toe board. It is a 3x3 grid with your name in the middlebox. The other 8 boxes are the 8 houses or apartments nearest you. It’s not an exact representation of your neighborhood. No one lives on a tic-tac-toe board.

Draw three lines inside each of the 8 boxes. Write the names of neighbors who live in the houses near you on the first line. It may be first names only. On the second line, write down what you know about your neighbors that you wouldn’t know from just seeing them from your driveway. What do you know about their background and history? On the third line write down meaningful information. What do they want to do? What do they hope for? Questions to explore could be, “Why do you live here?” or “What are your hopes for this neighborhood?”

After years of leading the tic-tac-toe exercise with congregations and communities, Dave and Jay observed the following: around 10% can fill out the first line of the names of all 8 neighbors, 3% can fill out the second line for all 8 neighbors, and less than 1% can complete the third line for 8 neighbors near them.

The practice of a Neighborhood Map has layers of depth. It is a practice that requires intentional conversations with your neighbors. Maybe you start a Neighborhood Map this summer by completing the first or second line of the neighbors near you. The third line takes more time and requires interactions of transparency and vulnerability. A Neighborhood Map is a practice in listening, learning, and cultivating a love of your neighbors.

Practice

Make a tic-tac-toe board (Put your house in the center box.)
Make 3 lines inside each of the 8 boxes around your home.
Write names on line 1, background info on line 2, meaningful information on line 3.
Keep your Neighborhood Map visible. (Write down new names and background info as you learn it.)

Practices

Featured

The Absence of Apples

Autumn affords organic rhythms to connection and community. The harvest season has brought people together across the centuries and civilizations. The abundance of produce that orchards and farms provide each autumn offers a natural cause to come together.

Generosity

Remembering my grandfather, I think first of his generosity. As young boys, my brother and I waited all year to see his giant Chrysler station wagon (wood paneled), loaded with Christmas gifts, pull up in the driveway. After becoming a young widower, giving gifts made him happy. He loved to find treasures for us at FAO Schwarz and then watch us enjoy them. Gifts for our mom were fancy, pretty stuff that she put up high, out of our reach. Pop gave good gifts.

National Good Neighbor Day

Research consistently shows that a neighborhood’s overall well-being and local school performance go hand in hand, and teacher retention plays a key role in school performance. High teacher turnover is linked to lower student achievement, weaker school culture, more disruption, and higher costs for hiring and training replacements. That is one reason we make it a priority to bless our teachers each year with care packages.

Teacher Care Packages

Welcome Home Dinner

Hosting a “Welcome Home Dinner” is a return to the simple practice of sharing stories and images of meaningful moments with others.

The mediums of visual storytelling have sharply shifted over the last few decades. As a child, I recall any visit to my grandparents in Texas would include my grandfather setting up his slide projector, and click by click, washed-out images of their latest travels would appear on the screen. As I began working with students in churches in the early 1990’s, no summer camp or mission trip was complete without the end of the week video with a montage of pictures that captured the most memorable moments. Spontaneous laughter and applause would punctuate the photos of the highlight reel.

Bibles & Bourbon

For more than a decade Josh Haynes has been inviting men to the practice of sharing a drink and sharing a conversation about life and faith. Josh shared the origin, “We would pick a Thursday night once a month, everyone would show up on their bike, and we'd ride to a local brewery.”

Call Your Mother

My mother, Marilyn Mackey, called her mother every Saturday morning for 30 years. “We would call to stay connected and know what was going on in each other's lives.” My mother reminds me, “That was when we paid for long-distance calls too.” But the practice of staying connected begins a generation before her. “My mother’s relationship with her mother, Grandma Miller, was that we saw them every weekend. We would go to their house on the farm and have a meal and play games.”

Role-Playing

Role-playing, commonly associated with acting and theater, can be a powerful tool for cultivating connection and understanding with our neighbors. Through the practice of creatively entering an imaginary situation, we can begin to build the necessary skills to respond to challenging interactions.

Civility

“What practice do people need to love their neighbors and neighborhoods during an election?” I asked former Englewood Mayor and City Council member Linda Olson. She replied clearly and concisely, “Civility.” The following principles about the practice of civility are excerpts from a work by Linda for the Colorado Municipal League. She generously shared her wisdom about what is needed to cultivate civility.

Meal Trains

Providing meals is a nourishing way to love your neighbors. It may be for a family welcoming home a new child or welcoming a new neighbor to the neighborhood.

Support Local Artists

As I was growing up, the smell of turpentine and the whir of a sewing machine filled my senses. My mom was an artist and my husband David’s mom was a musician. His home was alive with the beautiful sound of Bach flowing from his mother’s piano. Being raised in creative homes, we learned the value of both artist and art.

Public Transportation

Public transportation provides a practical way to know your neighbors and neighborhood. It is a different method of moving around the city. For many it is essential as it eliminates the cost of owning and operating an automobile.

Wandering

Wandering is a counter script to the often overly scheduled lives centered around efficiency and productivity. Wandering is a practice that cultivates curiosity, looking to be interrupted by the world around you. When we are willing to wander, we have the possibility of being present to what is around us.

Standing in the Awkward

Standing in the awkward is the practice that tells our neighbors they are worth our discomfort. On the other side, we may get more comfortable, or at least get more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Prayer in the Park

People who live in the neighborhood who may attend different local congregations or participate in various expressions of the Church, can come together to pray in and for the neighborhood. The simple practice of praying in a park will help guide your prayers for people and ground your prayers in place.

Delivery Drivers

Gratitude for delivery drivers cultivates hospitality for all those who serve us in unseen ways.

Asking for Help

Asking a neighbor for help is being aware of our needs and one of our greatest needs is to live in community. Asking for help is a practice that cultivates humility in us.

Supporting Kids Sports

Showing up and saying you love to watch a kid from your neighborhood play sports, at any level, cultivates joy. It is a playful practice of showing love for your neighbors, and builds confidence and connection with their kids.

History

The place you call home has a history. The geography where you live has a story. To know your neighborhood begins with the practice of knowing the history of your neighborhood. Learning the history of the place you and your neighbors live is a spiritual practice.

Coffee on the Corner

We must know our neighbors to love our neighbors. Only in doing life together do we make visible the heart of Jesus to our neighbors. Coffee Friday might be the practice for you to get to know your neighbors. Or, replace coffee with something else that might unite your neighbors. I bet on coffee.

“It is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to heaven.”

— Wendell Berry

The neighborhood is a sacred place. We too often come and go from neighborhoods without intention or attention. Our sidewalks can become ordinarily familiar, the houses and people passing by in a blur. But our neighborhood—our block, our street, or our apartment building—is sacred. It’s where the story of God, people, and place intersect.

God’s first question in Scripture is about place. “Where are you?” God’s inquiry was not for His benefit—it is for ours. And it still is. At the beginning of human history, God is working in a specific place, a garden in the east, in Eden. At the fulcrum of human history, God is present again in the person of Jesus, living and working in specific places: in Galilee, in Jerusalem. And it is in the place called Golgotha, the place outside the city, that his blood enters the dirt He created. From Creation to the cross, we are in a story of place.

Our neighborhood is ordinary. But God has always inhabited ordinary places. Mailboxes, porch lights, and recycling bins. Dogs barking, kids shouting, and sprinklers spraying. The home of the neighbor who has lived here for decades and the home of the new-to-the-city neighbor. The new coffee shop and the old corner gas station. These all form a liturgy of place with holiness hidden in plain sight.

Our neighborhoods are the actual location of spiritual formation. It is here we learn to be present to God, to our neighbor, and ourselves. Real neighbors have real needs. And real proximity often reveals real tension. To love our neighbor is not to exist in the absence of difficulty; instead, it is God’s presence that invites us to be formed as we navigate it. If we can see our neighborhood in this way, even conflict becomes an opportunity to grow in grace.

Our neighborhoods provide specificity to the concept of “love your neighbor.” The names of those who live next door are not an abstract concept, but physical beings deeply loved by God that we are invited to learn to love as He does. Our neighborhoods are often the environment where we have the unique opportunity for learning from longevity. Living in the same location for years re-forms us in the patient process of becoming a good neighbor. Our neighborhoods are places of reciprocity. Learning that love of neighbor does not only give, it also receives.

God is already present and at work in the lives of those in our neighborhood. When we learn to open our eyes, our hearts, and our hands, we join Him in what He is doing. The invitation to participate in the story of God by loving our neighbor is just outside our front door. The neighborhood is a sacred place.

Places

Featured

Driveway

The driveway is a sacred place. Although driveways are often referenced as utilitarian space and considered an unwanted hallmark of suburban neighborhood design, they transcend their uniform purpose to be a place where countless moments of our lives are shared. Far more than simply serving a task of automobile entry, they provide a place where we are welcomed and welcome others. Our driveways serve as an extension of our home and hospitality.

Car Line

The car line is a sacred place. Is there any other stretch of pavement so dormant most of the time, yet so quickly a pivotal logistics ground for twenty minutes twice a day? During the school year, at set times, cars descend. And with the cars come neighbors overlapping lives. Neighbors cutting each other off, yielding, and goodbying. Neighbors who hold fully aligned hopes for those twenty minutes: that this day will be a good one for our children, that they will be loved, safe, and developed.

Sun Valley Youth Center

Sun Valley Youth Center is a sacred place. The center is a constant within a Denver neighborhood that has experienced consistent economic challenges and decades of conflict around urban development. At the center of this Denver neighborhood is Sun Valley Youth Center, and at the core of Sun Valley Youth Center is Kris Rollerson. Kris is a dedicated leader, community advocate, and care provider who has loved the neighbors and neighborhood of Sun Valley for nearly 30 years.

Plant Sale

A plant sale is a sacred place. It is a convergence of care that cultivates plant life in a particular place. It is an intersection of community activation, education, and commerce—all to connect people more deeply with plants and place.

RESOURCES FOR ORDINARY TIME

Recommended Books

The ordinary is where most of life with God happens. Read slowly. Stay curious. Pay attention not only to what the Spirit might be doing in you, but also to what the Spirit might be inviting you to notice and join around you.