“Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” – Exodus 3:5

The carpeting 
wasn’t anything special –
just the worn, 
mass-produced material
of department stores across the nation.

And the shallow shelving, 
cradling scattered boxes
of assorted shoes was 
– at best – 
completely nondescript. 

With piped in music,
spent shoppers, and  
whirling workers, 
who’d have thought
time would suspend?

But in those words
“we should bless”
and 
“right now,”
we gathered, and circled,
and held. 

Music stopped. 
Shelves faded.
People vanished.
Only hands clasped
and Love spoke. 

Who knew the sacred 
showed up in street clothes?
That outside fitting rooms
is a fitting place to stand   
on holy ground?

There is so much that crams the calendar in the month of December. Shopping, cleaning, cookies, holiday parties, school events and concerts, appointments, end of year deadlines… On top of that, there’s sometimes this strange feeling that comes with winding down one year and beginning a new year. There’s the tension between what was and what is to come – between gratitude, and maybe even some exhaustion or disappointment, and the hopeful expectation of what can be.

Still, the season of Advent persists. It invites us to slow down and to make space to sit in the middle of all the busy-ness and swirling feelings. To pay attention. To wait. To watch. To appreciate. To see where the holy might be breaking in right in the middle of already overflowing days.

When those moments come, how can you grant yourself the grace and the permission to pause and savor them?

How might you allow yourself to set aside expectations and perceptions about what should be and be fully alive in the imperfect beauty of what actually is?

Toward the end of a shopping trip, we encountered dear friends we hadn’t seen in quite a while and catching up near the shoe racks, this incredibly holy moment transpired. We received a prayer and a blessing right in the middle of the store. It was so incredibly moving. In my fatigue and – let’s be honest – a bit of world-weary crankiness, God broke through into what was absolutely mundane and ordinary. It felt like a liminal space, like holy ground, and thinking back on the setting, I chuckled at and deeply appreciated God’s creativity in all of this playing out near the shoes! “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground…”

May you allow yourself the joy of being surprised and delighted in the normal and the ordinary.

May you give yourself grace enough to create a sliver of space and a moment of time in which to be awed.

May you find yourself standing on holy ground.

© Annabelle P. Markey