For some strange reason, God must place a great deal of value on routine and ordinariness, since this is clearly where we spend the bulk of our time. Unless your life is wildly more adventuresome than mine, most of our days are filled with the mundane, the easily forgettable, and frankly, the downright boring. We make our beds, do the dishes, shop for food, mow the lawn, run errands, answer e-mails, drive the kids to endless events, attend committee meetings, watch television, balance the checkbook, and so forth and so on.

I read once that, if a person lives to be eighty years old, that person will have roughly spent: 2,000 hours brushing his or her teeth … 204,400 hours sleeping … 43,800 hours eating … 58,400 hours performing household chores … 14,600 hours stuck in traffic … and 87,600 hours doing routine assignments at work. If anything, these estimates are probably on the conservative side for most of us. Still, it is startling to think that of the 700,800 hours that we will enjoy on this earth by the time we reach our eightieth birthday, we will have spent at least 410,000 hours—more than half of our lives!—doing what appears to amount to a whole lot of nothing.

Of course, you can always try to increase your efficiency by becoming a master of time management and squeezing a little more productivity out of each and every day. But no matter how well you happen to prioritize and multitask, there are certain tasks that must be done—and chances are that a good many will be “routine and ordinary.” So how do we glorify God, if our lives are constantly consumed by the tedious and insignificant?

One possibility is to follow the path of Brother Lawrence. Somewhere around the year 1638, Brother Lawrence (whose real name was Nicolas Herman) entered the Discalced Carmelite Priory in Paris, France. Since he lacked the necessary education to become a cleric, he was assigned instead to the monastery kitchen, where he spent his days cooking and cleaning.

However, rather than seeing his work as non-spiritual, Brother Lawrence decided that, with the right attitude, even the most common of tasks could be done to the glory of God. Before long, the other monks noticed the zeal and enthusiasm with which he worked, and were inspired to attend more faithfully to their own labors. “The key to spiritual growth,” said Brother Lawrence, “does not consist of replacing our daily tasks with more spiritual ones; but rather, in understanding that even the ordinary and mundane can serve to praise God.”

True, many of us will still have our fifteen minutes of Andy Warhol fame. We may receive a prestigious award at work, or win a game in the last second, or see our photo on the front page of the paper. But for every fifteen minutes of fame, we will likely spend hundreds of thousands of hours involved in the daily routine. So which is more important—the fifteen minutes or the hundreds of thousands of hours? I dare say that if all we are living for is those fifteen minutes, then we are not living for very much. It is the time we spend attending to the little things that counts for the most!