The Sacred Ordinary: A Mother’s Hidden Calling

There is a basket of laundry by the foot of the bed. It has been there since Tuesday. The socks need matching, the towels need folding, and somewhere beneath the pile is a child’s favorite shirt that was promised for tomorrow. Outside, the world is doing important things. People are signing contracts, giving speeches, building empires. And here you are, folding the same fitted sheet you folded last week, which will need folding again next week, and the week after that, world without end, amen.

If you have ever stood over a sink full of dishes and wondered whether any of it matters, this devotion is for you.

 

The Scandal of the Shoreline

When Jesus began to gather those who would shake the foundations of the world, He did not go to the temple courts. He did not go to the academies of the rabbis or the palaces of the powerful. He went to a smelly stretch of beach where men were doing the most repetitive, unglamorous work imaginable.

“As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people’” (Matthew 4:18-19, NRSV).

Notice what they were doing. Casting nets. And a few verses later, James and John are in the boat with their father, Zebedee, “mending their nets” (Matthew 4:21).

This is not heroic labor. This is maintenance. It is the kind of work that earns no applause because no one even sees it being done. A fisherman who fails to mend his nets simply has no nets tomorrow. The work is invisible precisely when it is done well, and only conspicuous in its absence.

Jesus chose these men. He did not choose them in spite of their ordinary work but, in some mysterious way, because of it. He saw in their callused hands and patient labor the very disposition He needed for the building of His Kingdom. The men who could sit for hours threading torn mesh back together, who could rise before dawn to do again what they had done the day before, were the men He could trust with eternity.

“I will make you fish for people.” The Greek here is striking. The verb poiēsō means “I will make” or “I will fashion.” Jesus is not erasing what they have been; He is fashioning them further. He takes the ordinary skill and elevates it. The fisherman becomes the fisher of souls. The mender of nets becomes the mender of broken hearts. The patience learned over fish becomes the patience required for human beings, who are far more difficult to catch and far more prone to slipping through the net.

 

The Hidden Logic of God

There is a divine logic at work here that the world consistently misses. The world believes that great callings prepare you for greater callings, that prestigious work prepares you for more prestigious work.

But God’s economy runs in the opposite direction. It is the small, faithful, hidden labors that prepare a soul for the truly great work of the Kingdom.

Why did Jesus not call the Sanhedrin? Why not the Pharisees with their scriptural memorization, or the Sadducees with their political sophistication, or the priests with their liturgical training? Many of these had inherited their stations or had been groomed for them in comfort.

They had not learned the discipline of necessity. They had not been taught by the long, slow tutor of repetitive work that no one notices.

The fishermen had.

And so when Jesus called, “immediately they left their nets and followed him” (Matthew 4:20).

Their immediate response was not impulsive. It was the readiness of souls who had been quietly trained for years in the art of attentive labor, in showing up, in doing what had to be done whether or not anyone watched.

This is the great secret hidden in plain sight throughout Scripture: God prepares His servants in obscurity before He uses them in the open.

Moses kept sheep in the wilderness for forty years before he led a people out of slavery. David kept his father’s flocks before he kept the kingdom of Israel. Even the Word made flesh spent thirty hidden years in a carpenter’s shop before three years of public ministry.

The ratio is not accidental.

The hidden, ordinary years are not the prelude to the real work. They are themselves the foundation, the formation, the very thing that makes the public work possible.

 

The Mother at the Center of Salvation

It is no accident that when God determined to save the world, He did so through the calling of a mother.

When Gabriel came to a young woman in a small town, he did not find her in a temple. He did not find her holding a scepter. He found her at home, going about whatever ordinary task filled the day of a Galilean girl. And she, like the fishermen who would come after her, gave the immediate response of a soul prepared by hidden faithfulness: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

What followed was thirty years of work the world would consider beneath notice.

Mary nursed an infant. She washed swaddling clothes. She ground grain and kneaded bread and swept a small home in a small town. She taught a small boy His prayers, even though He was the one to whom all prayer is ultimately addressed. She mended His clothes as Zebedee’s sons mended their nets. She did the work that no one sings of, the work that has no monument, the work that constitutes the actual substance of most human lives.

And then, when her Son began His public ministry, one might have thought her work was done. But here is what is so striking: Mary’s mothering does not end when active mothering ends.

She is there at Cana, prompting the first miracle.

She is there at the foot of the cross, where Jesus gives her to John and John to her: “Woman, here is your son” (John 19:26).

And she is there in the upper room on the day of Pentecost, where “all these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus” (Acts 1:14).

The mother of the Lord becomes the mother of the Church. The hidden labor of decades is fulfilled, not abandoned, in a wider mothering. The same hands that taught one Boy to pray now steady the hands of the apostles as they wait for the Spirit.

The same heart that pondered all things and treasured them up (Luke 2:19) now ponders the mystery of the Body of Christ being born into the world.

 

The Mending of Nets

Mother, do you see what your work is?

When you wipe the same counter for the ten thousandth time, you are mending nets. When you read the same picture book for the fortieth night in a row, you are mending nets. When you listen to a teenager rehash a friendship drama you have heard variations of for years, you are mending nets. When you sit by the bedside of a sick child, when you pack the lunches, when you remember which child does not like the crusts and which one does, when you do the invisible accounting of a family’s emotional life, you are mending nets.

And the Lord is watching from the shore.

He is not impatient with the smallness of the work. He is not embarrassed by its repetition. He is, in fact, fashioning you through it. He is making you into someone who can be trusted with greater things, because you have been faithful in what the world calls little.

There is a temptation, especially in seasons when the work feels endless, to believe that nothing of eternal weight is happening. The world reinforces this lie constantly. The world measures significance by visibility, by applause, by quantifiable output. By those measures, motherhood is one of the least significant occupations imaginable.

A mother’s labor produces no shareholder value.

It cannot be put on a résumé in any meaningful way.

But the Kingdom of God does not run on the world’s metrics. The Kingdom runs on the metrics of the shoreline, where a Carpenter chose fishermen because their hidden faithfulness had made them ready. The Kingdom runs on the metrics of Nazareth, where a Mother’s quiet decades shaped the One who would shape the world.

 

When the Children Leave

For the mother whose children are grown, whose hands are no longer needed for the small tasks of small bodies, there is a particular grief. The work that had filled the days no longer fills them. The house is quiet. The fridge stays full longer. And the question rises: what now?

I'm not sure if it's an official DSM-IV diagnosis, but it's colloquially known as empty nest syndrome.

Look again at Mary. Her active mothering of Jesus ended when He left to begin His ministry. But she did not stop mothering.

She mothered differently. She mothered the disciples. She mothered the infant Church. She became a mother to John, and through John, to all of us.

Jesus is calling you still. He is calling you to be a mother of men, in the largest sense. The patience you developed over decades, the wisdom you accumulated in hidden years, the capacity for love you grew in the long school of the home, these are not now obsolete.

They are now precisely what the Kingdom needs.

There are young mothers who need you. There are lonely souls who need you. There are people in your parish, your neighborhood, your circle, who have never been mothered well, and who can be mothered now by you.

The hidden years were the preparation. The visible years are simply the same vocation in a wider field.

 

Practical Wisdom for the Sacred Ordinary

How, then, do we live this?

First, refuse the world’s valuations. When the voice rises that says your work is small, recognize it as a lie and dismiss it. Speak to yourself the truth that the One who upholds the universe was once held in human arms and taught to walk by His mother’s hand.

The ordinary is not the opposite of the holy. It is, more often than not, the place where holiness lives.

Second, do the small work with attentive care. Mend the nets. Do not despise the repetition. The repetition is not a tax on your real life; it is, in great measure, your real life, and it is the very means by which God is forming your soul into someone who can be entrusted with eternal things. This is the work of love, and Love is not just a fantasy for rom-coms or the headline of greeting cards. It is the very being of God, Himself.

Third, when you feel invisible, remember that you are seen. The Lord saw the fishermen on the shore before they ever saw Him. He sees the laundry, the late nights, the unspoken sacrifices. “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).

Fourth, hold your work with open hands. The same hands that fold the laundry today may be called to fold around the shoulders of a grieving friend tomorrow. The same patience learned over toddlers may be needed for an aging parent, a wayward adult child, a stranger in a pew. Trust that nothing you have learned in hidden faithfulness will be wasted.

Finally, when Jesus calls, follow immediately. He may not be calling you away from your work. He is far more likely to be calling you deeper into it, transforming it from beneath, fashioning you through it into a fisher of men, a mother of multitudes, a soul ready for the Kingdom.

The basket of laundry is still by the foot of the bed. But the One who walked the shore of Galilee walks past it now, and He sees.

And He is not asking you to be impressive. He is asking you to be faithful.

That has always been enough. That has always been everything.