Is There Meaning in the Mundane?

Marc Jolicoeur · Tidal Church Moncton · January 26, 2025 · Redeeming Your Routine series

Marc Jolicoeur looks at Colossians 3:23 and the life of Brother Lawrence to show how everyday tasks gain meaning. No task is insignificant, God has purposes for each one, and He is present with us in them.

More from Marc Jolicoeur · The Redeeming Your Routine series

Topics: Purpose, Work, Discipleship

Transcript

[0:00] Week four, right? Week four of this series, Redeeming Your Routine. Happy to hop in. I have been excited about this series. Well, hey, I was excited about this series before you even knew it was a series. I've been looking forward to it for a very long time. I just knew that it was gonna connect really deeply with a lot of you, because it connected really, really deeply with me. So, week one, Jeremy talked to us about, you know, why work stinks. And in week two, he reminded us why we have to work in the first place, right? As part of our kind of image bearing. And then last week, Sarah gave us just this amazing message about how we can find meaning in what we do in our work. And then I get to hop in here and say, how can we find meaning in the mundane? Can you say the word "mundane"? Mundane. It's a fun word.

[0:47] It's actually so fun that people have really gotten excited about the word "mundane" over the last little while. There's this fun thing that you can do on the internet: you can look up things. It's pretty cool. So if you look up the word "mundane," you can actually see, and this might be a little bit difficult for you to see, but I'll walk you through it. This is the year 1800, and this is the year 1960. That's important for you to know. 1800, 1960, modern day. This charts how often the word "mundane" is used in print during this time. So nobody, a little spike there, but nobody cares. Nobody cares, nobody cares. 1960, well, we care. People are fascinated. People are obsessed. You might even say with kind of the mundaneness of life. It's kind of all over in pop culture. This morning I was just thinking about, like, what's an example? Maybe a show like The Office, maybe the first season in particular, when you see people just kind of behind computers, staring blankly off into the sunset.

[1:41] This idea that life is mundane and also work is mundane. But I'm here to tell you that there is a way to find meaning even in the quote unquote "mundane" things of life. And we'll talk a little bit more about that word kind of near the end. But I wanna say that even if you have been blessed to find deep meaning in what you do, whether that's as a career or as a student, there are still probably, for all of you, some kind of, like, mundane things in your life. So, like, a neurosurgeon, for example, has to take out the trash, probably. If you are a CEO of a company, you still quite likely brush your teeth, or at least you should do that.

[2:29] I would recommend that you do that. And if you're a teacher, somebody who's, like, you know, pouring into the next generation, you still should make sure that your lawn is mowed. Maybe you can pay somebody to do that, maybe you can't, I don't know. But all these little things, and I'm sure that all of you, if you stopped and thought about it outside of your kind of primary vocation, you can think of this thing that's mundane. Can you think of that right now? Do you have kind of a thought in your mind, a task? If you're, like, bursting to say it, you can even kind of whisper it to the person next to you. If you know them, don't say it to strangers. That'd be kind of weird. But if you have that task in front of you, keep it in front of you as we go forward this morning. So I think it'll be helpful to think that through.

[3:17] So we're gonna give us kind of three different ways to ask questions and to think about how we can find meaning in the mundane. And one of the things that I love about this church, and also, kinda be honest, one of the things that kinda makes it difficult, is that you all across this room, you have different people who feel differently about the questions of faith. So I have people in this room who have been followers of Jesus for, like, 50 years. If Brother David was here this morning, I could testify to that for sure. But I know some of you, and I know for decades and decades you've been followers of Jesus. And I know some of you are actually pretty new at following Jesus. And so this is all pretty fresh, and I'm confident that there's people in the room this morning. In fact, I do know this, who are like, I'm not sure me and Jesus, not necessarily, right?

[4:05] There are seekers who are here, and that's always the case here at Tidal Church. We always have such a wide array of people to think about as we start to give applications and start to process this. So I have something for each of you this morning. It's gonna be kind of like we're gonna go through in layers. I'm gonna start at the top of the funnel, and for this, everybody can hop in. I promise this will have meaning for you. And as we go along, we'll invite you, of course, to keep going. But some of you might feel like you need to kind of tap out for the time being. So the first thing, starting at the top: how can you find meaning in the mundane by understanding that there are truly no insignificant tasks? There are truly no insignificant tasks.

[4:51] Here's the question. Why do you do the mundane? Remember that task that you had in your mind there? Why should we do these things? There's actually a really old poem. I tried to look up to see who wrote it, and nobody can really tell me. It was published, I think, first time was in the 1600s, but all indications were that person didn't write it. And I read it when I was in school, and it's called, I think it's called "For Want of a Nail," or at least that's the first words. It goes like this. And this is kind of old englishy. So "for want of" means, like, gosh, I sure wish I had one of these things. We missed it. So it's very short. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

[5:52] So if you don't track along with kind of old timey stuff, what the bottom line is, because they didn't have, the horse didn't have a nail for his shoe, the kingdom was lost. They lost the kingdom, right? And it's like, wow, this really insignificant little thing, this lack of one nail for the horseshoe, the thing, the horseshoe, the shoe that goes on the horse. Because of that, they lost the whole kingdom. It's like, that sounds insane until you see the cause and effect of one thing leading to another, right? Every little thing actually kind of does matter. Science fiction has known this for a long time. Anybody ever see the movie Back to the Future? I hear the chuckles. Okay. So, you know, it's like he goes back in time and he does one thing. It's like, oh no. And now my parents don't meet. And the world is a significantly different place. There's a concept called the butterfly effect.

[6:39] Butterfly effect is, like, in essence, a butterfly flaps its wings on this side of the world, and on the other side of the world, there's a tsunami, right? Obviously not because of the amount of force that that butterfly exerted, but because of the cause and effect. And this is not just like old timey movie stuff. My kids read a book series, which I'm ashamed to admit is called Captain Underpants. But in Captain Underpants, there's also this concept of like, they go back in time and they do this one thing, and then the world is different in the future. Not because they assassinated a present because they, I think they stepped on a banana or something like that. I can't remember. But it's all kind of like whimsical and nonsensical until you realize that actually every little thing that we do does have knock-on effects.

[7:25] It's not just for science fiction, it's for life. So like, if you're going on a walk and you pass somebody, whether or not you engage with or smile at that person, not even like share the gospel, but just like, you know, just that insignificant thing can have a dramatic impact on their day. And if it has a dramatic impact on their day, heaven knows what it will have on the rest of their life, right? Because each life is built one day at a time. If you're going on that walk and you decide not to tie your shoes before you head out, well, heaven knows what will happen if you trip. If you trip. Can you imagine the consequences that could happen? It's one thing if you trip on the sidewalk. It's a different thing if you trip on the road just 'cause you didn't tie your shoes.

[8:11] Yeah, because you didn't tie your shoes. And then what if you decide to leave a note or send a text message before you go out on that road for a little walk? Can you imagine the people who receive this information, you know, whether any of these terrible things or good things happen, how will they know? How would that impact them all? Because you didn't scratch something on a little sticky note before you walked out the door. Yeah, all of those things, everything is significant because it all has an impact in life. Now, I have not been working in ministry for 55 years. I've been at this church for nine years and before that I've worked a lot of jobs. And a number of those jobs were factory work. I don't wanna see a show of hands for people who've done factory work, but you can let out a sigh.

[8:56] It can be difficult, it can be challenging. It's incredibly difficult actually. And so, you know, one of those jobs is in a plant that manufactured stuff for Ikea. So you're just kind of standing there. And I'm pretty sure a robot has replaced this job by this point in time. I don't know. But 20 years ago when I was doing it, it was literally taking something that came off a conveyor belt and putting it on a box off a conveyor belt, putting it in a box, eight hours. I've also spent a whole day taking pallets and stacking pallets and stacks of 10 and then moving those pallets into another area so they can be stacked onto another area, et cetera. These can seem like insignificant things, but you know what, this morning I engaged with, and you probably did too, furniture in a home, hopefully for most of us, right?

[9:52] And furniture is incredibly important. It's not only just given as gifts, but it keeps our lives together. Furniture is important. You notice it's important. Buildings, you know what was on the pallets that I was moving at one point in time? Stone masonry stuff that goes on the outside of buildings, right? What are we in right now? A building. That's right. All of these things matter. There is truly nothing insignificant. But I told you things about work. What about things that are not work? Last night, my family and I went downtown to watch a hockey game. And as you're going around town, you're like, my goodness, where am I gonna park? And I noticed that there was a place that would've been big enough for me to park in if, I don't know, the person who had parked in this place had just been a little cozier with the person behind them, right?

[10:44] And my wife will attest the fact that I am not only a bad parallel parker, I'm just a bad parker in general. So this is not the pot calling the kettle, actually, this is the pot calling the kettle black. This is not me throwing stones 'cause I live in a glass house. Choose your metaphor. The point is that all of those little things actually do matter. How I park a car can have a dramatic impact on not just myself and my family, but other people. So how can you find meaning in the small things of life again, just like on a very top level, by understanding that actually none of those things are insignificant. All of them have significance. Now, as we start to move a little bit further down towards what we're supposed to be doing when we gather at a church, right?

[11:31] Talking about Jesus, another way to find meaning in life is by understanding that God has purposes for all of our tasks. God has purposes for all of our tasks. Or a question that you could ask is, for whom do you do the mundane? And I looked it up, I'm pretty sure that whom is the word here instead of who. But if you want to correct me, you can do that. For whom do you do the mundane? There's a passage of Scripture that immediately burst to my mind when I was thinking about this passage, this topic. And it was this. It's from Colossians chapter 3, verse 23, just a simple verse. It says, in the NIV, it says, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, and not for human masters."

[12:22] Now for those of you who are new here, or you know, maybe you haven't heard this before. We actually like all of us here on staff, all of the communicators, all the leaders in this church, we hope that when you see like words like this on a screen, you actually, you look them up yourself. So here's the thing. I actually don't walk around with a giant black Bible. Most of the time I have a phone though, and the phone has a Bible on it, and then I'm able to kind of take a look at things. But we as communicators don't want to just say, the Bible says, and then have you show up next Sunday and hear somebody else say at another place, the Bible says. We actually genuinely want you to take a look at what the Bible says. We want you to dig in. And if you see something different, hey, you can let us know.

[13:09] We'd love to do that. Why am I saying this? Here's why I'm saying this, because I'm hoping that you're gonna take a look at this passage of Scripture from Colossians chapter 3. It's a letter that Paul wrote to a church in Colossae. It's a beautiful letter, and this is a beautiful verse. In fact, I grew up, there's not a lot of the Bible that I have memorized, but this is a verse that I have memorized, but I have it memorized in the King James Version, the old English, right? "So whatsoever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord." You already said mundane. Do you wanna say heartily? Heartily is a fun word to... This is a little bit more readable, right? So whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for human masters. I want you to look it up. Here's the thing: when you look it up, you're going to see that this is talking to slaves.

[14:00] It's possible that some versions will use the word servants, but the word, the Greek word doulos, is flexible. And quite likely we're literally talking about slaves. And that's a touchy subject. So I'm diverting slightly here just so that you don't get shocked when you take a look at this. The Bible is an ancient book written to ancient people. It is God's Word for us, but the individual letters and books were not written to us. As I mentioned, Paul wrote this to a church in Greece in the year, give or take, AD 60. So it's a different world, people. And at that point in time, slavery was something that was going on. And so Paul was addressing these churches.

[14:46] And so I wanna show you actually though that these words, certainly I believe, applied way more than the people who were stuck in that life circumstance. If I show you, for example, if you look at it in the NIV, and I know this is gonna be a little bit hard to see, but I just wanna point out how biblical translations and how they're laid out on the page actually makes a bit of a difference. This is the same text, except it starts back here in verse 18, and it says here, "These are instructions for Christian households." Now, that's not part of the Bible. That's just what an interpreter has said, right? Letting you know that this whole section is written to different kinds of people who would be in Greek households at the time. So it has a verse that addresses wives, a verse that addresses husbands, a verse that addresses children and fathers. Of course, if you look at the footnote next to fathers, it would say, "It probably means parents."

[15:35] So husbands, wives, children, parents. And then verse 22 shows up here and it says, "Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything you do. And do it not only when their eyes are on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord." And you're like, "Whoa, that's gnarly. I didn't expect to read that in the Bible." And that's fair. Okay? Again, this is a challenging thing to see, but this is where we get our verse. Verse 23: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord and not for human masters. Since you know that you'll receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward, it is the Lord Christ that you're serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for the wrongs, and there is no favoritism."

[16:23] We'll stick back with that word, favoritism. So as I show you, they, the translators of the NIV, have decided to chunk this up together. But if you take a look at other English translations, like the New Living Translation or what we have here next, which is the NET, the New English Translation, they actually just make it kind of a paragraph, kind of stick it all together. And in that case, you might say, "Well, what difference does that make to me?" It makes verse 23 work in tandem with the other verses. So it's not only talking to slaves, it's talking to wives and husbands. It's talking to children and parents. And here's the kicker: it also, I believe, ties in the first verse of the next chapter. Now, you need to know, and if you don't know this, that when Paul was writing this letter, he wasn't like, "Chapter three," and then carried on or whatever. Like, Paul wrote a letter, woo.

[17:12] Like, when you write letters, you don't write... If you wrote me a letter and you had chapters, that'd be like, precocious. So that's not what happened, right? Like, he just wrote a giant letter and we broke it up into chapters and verses to make it easier to find and make references to. So whoever decided to put this chapter break here, I'm gonna say maybe the wrong call, because this verse here, the first verse of the next chapter, definitely interplays with what's going on here up above. And what does that verse say? It says, "Masters, treat your slaves with justice and fairness because you know that you also have a Master in heaven." So if you bring this verse up, whoop, and put it all together, verse 23, I submit applies to all of it.

[18:00] Verse 23 is the right one I'll be with. Yeah. Is that only when they're watching, like those who are strictly in verse 23? Yes: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for human masters." And it says here, there are no exceptions. Or as we read earlier, there is no favoritism. We are all together in this. Okay? So let's put verse, Colossians 3:23. Oh, no, sorry, I wanna say this really quickly because I've taken you into a place that you're like, "Why are we talking about this during the mundane?" Just because I want you to read this, and I want you to understand what is being said. Now, here's a couple things. Just think about really quickly. It is always important to consider the historical and literary contexts of each individual verse of Scripture.

[18:48] You don't want to take a verse out and read it by itself. Sometimes it means what you think it means. Sometimes it doesn't. The Bible never promotes slavery. I have heard people say the opposite, and I invite you and challenge you to prove me wrong. The Christian story is what has led to abolitionist movements throughout history and throughout the world. The gospel, the very beginnings of Jesus's good news to people. As Paul says elsewhere in Galatians, there is neither slave nor free from the very beginning. The idea was that every single person around this room, just like every single person who would've originally heard the letter to the Colossians, there is no distinction between them based upon race, based upon gender, or based upon social class.

[19:37] Okay, that's all for free. Or maybe you feel like I charged you for it, I'm not sure. But the point is, if we look back at this verse, without the blinders of having it be somebody that's about, you know, social economics or power, I think it applies to all of us. Verse 23 of Colossians chapter 3 says, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord and not for human masters." Now, if we think about that thing that you kept in the front of your brain from earlier, that kind of mundane lens, you might be asking yourself, rather, I'm asking you, how can I do that as though I'm doing it for the Lord? How could, like, cleaning my room be something that I do for the Lord?

[20:27] Or how could, I don't know, shoveling the driveway or doing the dishes? How could those be something that I do for the Lord? Well, Sarah read this passage of Scripture last week, and I think maybe Jeremy also read it. You know what? This is a passage of Scripture that we could read week in and week out. And this is one that you should memorize. When Jesus was asked, "What is the most important law?" What did Jesus say? This is from Matthew chapter 22, verses 37 to 39. He says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself."

[21:12] And the second is like it. So loving your neighbor as yourself is like loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, right? Jesus says somewhere, "Whatever you've done to the least of these, you've done it to Me." So as we remember from the first point, that when you do things well, it actually has impacts upon more than just you. When you clean your room well, it is a better environment for your family. When you shovel your driveway well, it's a better environment for your neighbor. When you clean the dishes well, it's a better environment for anybody who happens to eat off those dishes later on, right? Maybe it's you, maybe it's other people, but there are truly no insignificant tasks.

[21:59] And God has a purpose for all of our tasks, which ought to be to serve our neighbors, and then also, by doing that, to love Him. For whom do you do the mundane? So I mentioned we started at the top, we kind of work our way here, and now we're getting to the kind of the bottom of the funnel. And to be honest with you, this is where I fear to tread a little bit, because every single time that I step up on this platform and I say something, I think you're well within your rights to think, "Yeah, but Marc, do you do this?" And here's the place where I have to say, I have dabbled, I have walked in this direction, but I am not living fully what I'm about to say.

[22:47] I'm gonna own that so you can come at me. It's just the truth. But I do know that it is true, and that the deepest way to find meaning in the mundane is by experiencing God's presence with us in all our tasks, by experiencing God's presence with us in all our tasks. And the question that you can ask to kind of move you there is not "for whom," but "with whom do you do the mundane?" With whom do you do the mundane? So we know what the Bible says, you know, whatsoever you do, whatever you do, do it with all your heart. Well, there's a gentleman who is known to us in English as Brother Lawrence, and Brother Lawrence really took this to heart.

[23:40] Brother Lawrence was born, we believe, somewhere around 1614 in Lorraine, France. And he was born with the name Nicholas Herman, Brother Lawrence. He grew up and he joined the military when he was 18 years old. And, you know, so he fought in whatever wars France happened to have on the go at that point in time. And then one day out in the middle of the woods, he had a kind of a radical conversion. It's a strange story, kind of worth reading about, actually. He was just observing this dead tree, lifeless, leafless tree in the middle of winter. And he somehow was given this vision of understanding that that tree would rise again in the spring. And he was somehow invited by God into understanding that that was also his story, if he would follow Him.

[24:29] And so Brother Lawrence decided not only to give his life to Jesus at that point in time, but he wanted to become somebody who was living for Him. Now, he didn't go right from there onto his kind of next step of spiritual life. He actually, after he got out of military, he became a footman. And I don't know what a footman is. I have watched Downton Abbey, but I still don't fully understand what footmen do. But anyway, he did that for a while. But somewhere in his mid-twenties, Brother Lawrence joined a monastery. He became a Carmelite monk. And so we were talking earlier about the length of ministry, actually, of what one individual can do. Brother Lawrence joined the monastery somewhere in his mid-twenties, and he died at that monastery when he was 80. So it means that for more than 55 years, Brother Lawrence lived in the monastery.

[25:19] And in all that time, he didn't climb up to the top, whatever that might mean. He didn't become one of the directors of the monastery. He did two jobs during that time. One, he ran the kitchen, and two, he repaired sandals. Those were his gigs. You could see him here actually, washing dishes. This is obviously an artist's rendering, not from back then, but but that's what he was known to do. He was somebody who would work most of the day, frankly, because he didn't he didn't have a lot of kitchen help. Brother Lawrence wasn't really necessarily much of a reader. He definitely wasn't a writer. He's not remembered as somebody who wrote a book. However, we do think of him as somebody who wrote a book, kind of because somebody wrote a book about him, somebody who was in correspondence with him.

[26:06] They wrote letters back and forth, and they had a bunch of conversations. And that book in English is known to us usually as something called The Practice of the Presence of God, Practicing the Presence of God. And actually, at the end of this time together this morning, I'm actually gonna give you an opportunity, if you wanna sign up, I'll send you a link where you'll get not only some of the things that we've talked about this morning, but also a link where you can read this very, very short book online if you'd like to. I've heard about it for years, and I actually only read it all the way through for the first time in preparation for this message. And it's kind of a convoluted book, 'cause what it is, is just a recalling of a number of conversations that they had, and then also a correspondence of a couple letters back and forth. It's a little bit convoluted, and it's also incredibly stirring because Brother Lawrence wasn't known as somebody who was an eloquent speaker.

[26:56] He wasn't known as somebody who could, like, I don't know, solve all your problems. But people were drawn to Brother Lawrence because he had the actual living presence of God oozing out of him. There was just something about him. People were in awe. And part of living in a monastery point in time is that yes, he had tasks that he had to do, but also there were prayers. There were individual prayers that he would do privately. And there's also stuff that he would do kind of as part of a group, right? Like during chapel and whatnot. And so one of the things that Brother Lawrence says in the book is that after a number of years, and it took him a long time, but after a number of years, he said he found no more comfort being in private prayer or in the chapel than he did in the kitchen.

[27:44] It's like while he was washing dishes and scrubbing, you know, leftover oatmeal off the bottom of a pot, he said he felt the presence of God as thickly with him during those moments, as he did when he was on his knees in prayer. And people seem to think that that was the case. And so how did Brother Lawrence get to this place? Well, it took him a long time, as he says, but he also had a prayer. He had a way of entering into an awareness of God's presence. And that prayer goes something like this. It says, "My God, You are always close to me. In obedience to You, I must now apply myself to outward things. Yet as I do, I pray that You will give me the grace of Your presence.

[28:33] And to this end, I ask that You'll assist my work, receive its fruits as an offering to You, and all the while direct my affections to You." As I mentioned, I'm happy to send you this prayer for yourself, at the end, if you'd like to have that. It's a bit wordy, but it's very helpful, I think, to show us the process of how this man had started to think about life. He was happy when God was with him. And therefore, wherever he went, he was happy. Whatever he did, he was happy. And that's because God was always with him. And so I took this prayer, and if I had to take it, I'm, I often need to distill things. I like to know what the large thing is, but I need to distill it down to something that's a little bit more portable for me.

[29:20] And so if I took that prayer and kind of chunked it down to its core, I would say something like this: "Lord, since You are with me, help me to be with You." Right? And this is, as I mentioned, we're kind of down to the bottom of the funnel at this point in time. There's a lot of prerequisites for this kind of prayer. We have to be people who are actually committed to Christ. We have to be people who have God's Spirit living within us. Once we're there, though, we can understand that God actually is with us wherever we go. And God wants to be with us everywhere we go. It's actually us who need to have our attention focused on the fact that He's there. "Lord, since You are with me, help me to be with You. Lord, since You are with me, help me to be with You."

[30:15] He's as close to us, and wants to be and can be, as close to us as our very breath is. So how can we find meaning in the mundane? We can do that by understanding that there are truly no insignificant tasks, by understanding God's purposes for all of our tasks, and by experiencing God's presence with us in all our tasks. Or those three questions that could kind of help us as we're thinking this through: Why do you do the mundane? For whom do you do the mundane? And then with whom?

[31:01] With whom do you do the mundane? I mentioned at the beginning that we'd do a little bit more of a deep dive on the word "mundane." And so it's funny, if you take a look at the definitions for it, there's all kinds of definitions. But the one that you all thought of, I'm guessing the one that most of you thought of, that I thought of, that I led you towards, is this first one, which is that mundane means lacking interest or excitement. But there's another meaning for the word mundane, which is this: of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one. And if you are a French speaker in this room, or you're a Spanish speaker in this room, or a Portuguese speaker, or maybe you speak Latin, I don't know, any of these kind of Romance languages, you'll see how easy it is to trace the origins of this word, right?

[31:55] So if we look at the word mundane, it comes from the Latin mundus, and it kind of becomes mañana. And then old French is mal, but I believe that the word for world in Portuguese is mundo, same as in Spanish. So you can see how close the word mundane is, right? Worldly, of this world. Well, Brother Lawrence reminds us that the things that are, quote, "of this world," they can be experienced with God. Now, it's a challenge here. Bible says that Jesus wanted us to be in this world without being of this world, right?

[32:42] So the world can be a bit of a complicated word for the Bible, and it can be a complicated word for us. We don't want to think like the world, but we want to think with the world. We don't want to be of the world, but Jesus wants us to be in the world. And if we are supposed to be Christ bearers, then that means that we need to bear Christ with us into the world. And so nothing can be truly mundane when it is done for and with the divine. Nothing is mundane when it's done for and with the divine. Nothing can be worldly if we are able to do it for and with our heavenly Father.

[33:34] Let me pray for us this morning. Lord, Your heart is for this world. You gave Your Son. You loved this world so much that You sent Him into this world not to judge the world, but that so through Him the world might be saved. You love little things. You look at the lilies of the valley and say that if we were to be dressed even nearly as well as them, then we would be dressed like a king. Little things, little things matter. There is nothing that is outside of Your reach, nothing that is not able to carry significance and meaning if we are able to do it with You and if we're able to do it for You.

[34:26] And so, Lord, I pray for these people, Your people that You've called, that You've equipped. I pray that You'd help their eyes to be open to see that those things that they had in their minds at the beginning, those things that they are tempted to just put on autopilot or to even lament, that those little things can bring great glory to You if they're done, not only for You, but with You. Awaken Your people this morning to Your heart for them and Your heart for the mundane. In Jesus' name, we pray.