As a young girl, Corrie ten Boom found it curious that her father, a clock and watch repairman, treated his workbench like holy ground. His vocation seemed rather utilitarian, certainly not overtly Christian. Yet he approached it as sacred work.

One day Corrie observed her father struggling with a project. He laid the watch aside, and prayed, ​“Lord, you turn the wheels of the galaxies. You know what makes the planets spin and You know what makes this watch run….” The next morning Corrie found the clock perfectly restored — her father having received divine insight during the night to solve the problem. By inviting God to be his helper in the work, both his craft and his spirit were sustained. 

Experiences like this are not meant to be a rarity we only read about. Kingdom apprentices are people who are learning to live every aspect of our lives in unbroken communion and partnership with our Maker. 

Wendell Berry once wrote ​“There are no unsacred places; only sacred places and desecrated places.” Could the same be true of our work? Our words? Our interactions? 

The fact that God became one of us, lived a normal blue-collar life, and endured faithfully in struggles proves that there are no unsacred parts of human life; only sacred parts and desecrated parts. 

Those parts we seem so eager to be free of — the tiresome routines and ​“grunt work”? They’re actually what poet and pastor Joshua Luke Smith calls ​“the main event.” To wish them away would be a desecration.

Whenever they feel the walls closing in on them during painful or mundane moments, Joshua and his wife have a habit of saying This is the main event. It’s a phrase that re-sanctifies. And it carries God’s invitations: Don’t run away! Stay in your life. Take off your shoes; this is holy ground! 

Dallas Willard used the image of a ​“golden triangle” to explain that the process of spiritual formation involves the Holy Spirit’s work on a person through three inseparable dimensions, all visible in the life of Jesus: (1) letting the Holy Spirit be our ​“strengthener” and guide throughout the day, (2) participating in intentional practices, such as fasting and silence, and (3) accepting the trials and hardships of everyday existence rather than trying to escape them. 

I’m not a geometry whiz but I know when one side of a triangle shrinks, there will be an acute decline in the overall height of the triangle — in this case, in overall growth toward God in intimacy and conformity. 

The temptation to escape the holy reality of life and work is not new. Early Christians described being visited by a ​“noonday demon”—acedia—a feeling of restless discontent with ordinary workaday life that makes one loathe the very places and relationships in which God does some of his deepest work in our souls. 

The disordered desire to escape is perennial. What’s new is the profusion of technologies and products marketed to catch us at our most deflated moments and offer us an escape hatch. Casting the good life as a life free of effort and work is an act of desecration, not to mention deception. Even a pro-technology advocate like Bill Gates recently raised a red flag about AI eroding the landscape of human work and called for religious leaders to contribute wise guidance on how to ​“preserve our humanity in a time when machines can out-think us.” 

Mr. Gates suggests setting apart certain vocations as ​“human reserved.” He’s on the right track, I think. But if some roles are sacrosanct, why not others? Conservation only gets us part of the way. What we really need is consecration. 

We need to take off our shoes and sink into the holy humus of answering emails or waiting in the carpool line. We need to lean into our limitations and embrace interdependence with coworkers, churchmates, and family members. The difficulties are the main event! 

Grace waits for us in the humble workbenches and pews and kitchen tables of our lives, if we can see them as sacred.