A week or so ago, I had lunch with my friend Pete. Pete has a shining, angelic face, though he would laugh at such a description. He has always worn his heart on his face - broken, but redeemed; joyful even with sadness. We share a general sense of professional ineptitude, a vocation by grace alone. So, we are who we are, yet thankful.

We begin our lunch with a call to worship, a prayer of blessing over not only food but conversation, asking that we might build each other up, even, sometimes, pick each other up. There is a bit of small talk, the announcements of our life - work, home, family, the askings after - and then we move quickly into confession, the telling of our preoccupations and failings, followed by affirmations of God's grace.

"You want sweet tea," says Carol, an imposing server. The way she says it make me doubt that it's a question. Carol is like the whiskey priest with the communion wine, brusque and business-like, yet flawed. I hesitate.

"I'll have unsweetened." I realize that's like asking this unwitting acolyte for grape juice instead of wine, but I risk it. Carol shoves a pitcher across the table, leaves with a huff.

The soundtrack of our service is a cacophony of noises: the tentative, titterings of two elderly women across the way, eruptions of laughter from two construction workers in another corner, the unintelligible conversations of the many in the larger room next door, and the salutations of the hostess and the cashier by the door. We break bread, have communion, wash the biscuit down with ice tea, and I say, "What have you learned lately," as he says the same to me, and we begin to tell our small stories, our obscure meditations on our lives.

Tish Harrison Warren says that:

Christ's ordinary years are part of our redemption story. Because of the incarnation and those long, unrecorded years of Jesus' life, our small normal lives matter. If Christ was a carpenter, all of us who are in Christ find that our work is sanctified and made holy. If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity. If Christ spent most of his life in quotidian ways, then all of life is brought under his Lordship. There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God's glory and worth.

It's a reminder to me not to dismiss these small moments as insignificant, to not dismiss my life as insignificant. Carol refills my glass, and I smile. "Thank you," I say, gulping down half, gratefully, as Pete pushes back his chair. We are silent for a moment, content, resting in the refracted glow of God's grace toward us both.

In the end, with thankfulness, we rise and exit, blinking at the sunlight as we emerge. I walk him to his truck, a well-worn conveyance, and we say our benediction prayers there by the car door, out in the world, he pronouncing blessing over me and I over him, before we leave and return to the rest of our lives - to the ordinary, mundane, and obscure, to the papers to be filed and phone calls to be made, to the jots and tittles of law upon law, to common people who appear and reappear in our days.

Ordinary, yet shining.

[The quote is from Tish Harrison Warren's Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, IVP Books, 2016. The photo is by the late photo-journalist, Sol Libsohn, entitled "together in order to." It's what our ordinary lunch may have looked like in the 1930s.]