In my decades as a pastor, the complaint I heard most from all kinds of folks went something like this, "I want to have a stronger spiritual life, but my everyday life gets in the way."

Sound familiar?

There is an inherent fallacy in this statement that leaves us all with no perceivable solution.

There is no such thing as "a spiritual life." All we get, all we have, is "a life."

Our life. That's it. One indivisible thing. We are spiritual creatures, not creatures with some extraneous thing called a spiritual life.

The sooner we come to terms with this, the better. And the sooner we recognize that the playing field upon which we grow spiritually stretches out in front of us every single day, the sooner we can stop making excuses.

Our spiritual life and our ordinary, mundane life are one and the same.

Listen to how Christian Wiman describes this:

"Any attention turned toward spiritual truth is attention turned away from all we have come to think of as 'life.'

Thus we parcel out our moments of devotion - a church service here and there, a walk in the woods, a couple hours of meditation a week - all the while maintaining the frenzy of our usual existence outside of those moments.

This is inevitable, for the initial demands of any coherent spiritual life are intense, but it is not sustainable, for the soul is not piecemeal.

We are left with this paradox: only by hearing the farthest call of consciousness can we hear the call of ordinary life,

but only by claiming the most mundane and jangling details of our lives can that rare and ulterior music of the soul merge with what [poet] Seamus Heaney calls, 'the music of what happens.'"

(Christian Wyman, My Bright Abyss)

It is in the "frenzy of our usual existence" that we live with some kind of sense of God at hand, or we don't. It is in the mundane moments that we watch for glimmers of heaven peeking through, or not. It is in the ordinary stuff of life that we listen for the extraordinary whispers of the Divine, or not. It is in the midst of chores, and work and taking out the trash, buying groceries, preparing dinner, feeding the dog, working out a conflict, parenting kids, caring for our bodies -- in the very midst of all of these things we call life, that we either develop our spiritual muscle, open the ears of our heart, reach toward the One who reaches toward us, or not.

There is no spiritual life. There is just life.

Our main job is to stay awake while we live it.