I think a lot of us live in this mindset that Jesus came to bring our ordinary lives into the divine. But I think it is actually the other way around: Jesus brings the divine into our ordinary lives. I find it strange that our centers of religious extremity are places overflowing with the extravagant and the indescribable, visions of churches bursting at the seams with purple banners and stained glass windows. These religious icons, no doubt, serve a purpose in the aesthetics, but I think they are responsible, in some way, for the blinding of our eyes: many of us have come to think that it is in these arenas of religious extremity that God has made himself most available. On the contrary, I think it is in the ordinary, the mundane, in our day-to-day existence that God most desires to meet with us; sometimes when we enter a church, we change, but in our own homes, at our own tables, in our own neighborhoods and workplaces, we are most real with ourselves and each other. The real us - that's what God wants. So God took it upon himself to enter our world in the ordinary and the mundane.

Have we forgotten that God was not born in a hospital, but in a feeding trough? Have we forgotten that Jesus did not spend most of his life in a church, but sweating in a steaming carpentry shop, working 12 hour-shifts under the blistering desert heat? Have we forgotten that Jesus knows what it's like to lose those close to him - his biological father Joseph probably died when he was just about thirteen or fourteen, leaving him alone to work the shop.

God did not enter our world through a church. He entered our world through the everyday, monotonous, even boring lives we live. So we know this: the Message of Jesus isn't one solely about life in the hereafter, but one about life in the here and now, about life in the mundane, monotonous, the boring and uninteresting. It is in the everyday that God - that Jesus - resides.