From time to time, someone will express to me how good it is to be in church. “I just couldn’t make it Monday through Saturday,” the person will say, “without having my spiritual batteries recharged. Worship is what helps get me through the week!”

There is a lot of truth in that statement, of course. When done well, worship can be instructive and inspiring, and help fortify us for the week ahead. However, worship is also a great deal more. It is not just a holy pep rally aimed at getting us through the next six days. It is meant to change the way we live during those days. In effect, worship gives us a new way of looking at the world, and a fresh vocabulary to describe it.

The renowned physicist Neils Bohr—often credited with being the father of quantum mechanics—once said that the first inkling he had about the nature of the universe came when he was a child gazing into the fish pond at his family home. For hours on end, he would lie beside the pond, watching the fish swim back and forth.

Then one day he suddenly realized that the fish had no idea they were being watched. They were completely unaware of any larger reality. To the fish, sunlight streaming in from above was simply an inner illumination of the pond itself. Even when it rained, the fish saw this not as an event from the outside, but only as mysterious ripples within their own environment. Bohr began to wonder if humans were something like the fish in this regard—being acted on from other dimensions of reality, but unaware of it because of our limited frame of reference.

Bohr’s observation got me to thinking: What if Sunday morning is our chance to lie beside life’s pond, so to speak, and to realize that what often looks and sounds like events within the world are actually interventions from a different realm? What if worship allows us to see and hear what is usually hidden from our eyes and ears during the rest of the week? Namely, that God is present and at work in every corner of our life.

Maybe then we would not so easily say things like, “We go to church on Sunday, and then head back out into the ‘real world.’” As the theologian William Willimon has noted, this expression has it all backwards. Worship is the “real world.” At its most profound, worship is a way of beholding the world as it actually looks in its full, transparent, God-intended reality—a place where we can hear, and see, and experience what is genuinely true about our lives.

Put another way, the reason why we sometimes miss how God is at work in our lives is the same reason that fish don’t notice the water—we’re living in the midst of it. Indeed, it’s what makes our lives possible!