Day by day

“Now this is what you shall offer on the altar: two lambs of the first year, day by day continually. One lamb you shall offer in the morning, and the other lamb you shall offer at twilight…” [Exodus 29:38]

Today, I am deeply moved by God’s word to Moses.

The rest of the passage provides details on how the priest is to go about preparing and offering the two lambs. If I place myself in his shoes, I imagine that the bulk of my entire day would be spent preparing the lambs and the other offerings that went with it, considering there was to be one offering in the morning, and one in the evening. I imagine that I would be so much more conscious of God’s presence throughout the day, and that the labour of my hands would really be a form of prayer without words, as I prepare the daily offerings.

What a stark contrast this is, to the way we often think about sacrifice and surrender to the Lord. Somehow, we have come to think of surrender as a dramatic, one-off event that we subsequently refer back to as the moment of decision. There certainly is truth in that. There are many such defining moments in my walk with God and they are precious. But I have also come to realize that if these God-encounters are mostly in our past, and if we tend to talk about surrender in the past tense, something vitally important is missing in our life of faith, which is meant to be lived day by day, moment by moment.

I wonder how radically different our relationship to the Lord, and to others would look like, if we daily renewed our surrender to His ways twice a day – not in a legalistic manner, but as a conscious act of acknowledging Him in all our ways as a brand new day dawns, and as it draws to an end. We might also come to mark the passage of time in a different way. Instead of feeling as though time is a harsh slave master, pushing us in a hundred different directions, we might come to view time as God’s gift to us to be in His presence.

Today, I feel a hunger stirring deep within, to become such a person, living a life of surrender and sacrifice as surely as God brings the sunset and sunrise each day.