I was 14 when I made what could be considered my first real, personal act of faith. It had been a spiritual explosion of a weekend consisting of a deeply impactful high school retreat and a concert to see my favorite worship band. When, during the Altar Call at the concert, I decided to live my life for Jesus I felt as though I had become aware of the Holy Spirit in a powerful and emotional way. That weekend, and other events like it carried my faith and growth in spiritual maturity for a long time.

Eventually though, the impact of these things on me started to wane. At first, prayer felt like a delight, worship like breakthrough, and ministry like changing the world. Over time, they started to feel like spiritual chores.

I’m sure this experience is not unique to me. It’s all too easy for us to glamourize our vision of discipleship. We might know in our minds that any time spent in prayer is worthwhile but it certainly seems more so when it happens as we drink a single origin pour-over coffee from a designer IKEA mug by the window at sunrise.

It was for this reason that when I started to consider the life of the Holy Family, what the Canadian writer and Servant of God Catherine Doherty calls a “Nazareth spirituality,” a whole new spiritual horizon opened up for me. What we know of the Holy Family is sparse, mostly left to us by brief references in the Gospel of Luke and various writings and oral tradition from the Early Church.

What we do know is that it consisted of Mary, who was engaged at a young age and conceived miraculously by the Holy Spirit, Joseph, a carpenter, and Jesus, the Son of God. Looking back at them now, through the lens of the New Testament and Church History, they are a dynamic bunch. We give them monikers like “Joseph, Terror of Demons,” “Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth,” and “Christ the King, Lord of the Universe” but to those who knew them during their earthly lives, they would have just been Joseph, Mary, and their son Jesus.

The vast majority of Jesus’ life was spent in the context of this family. They would have eaten together, kept the customs of their Jewish faith, and went about their day to day tasks.

This is, in reality, what most of our lives look like. We have our opportunities in the days, weeks, months, and years to attend worship nights, get prayed over, intercede for physical healing, witness someone’s conversion, cry over the Scriptures, and exercise the spiritual gifts but these outsized moments take up a remarkably small percentage of life. For the most part, we spend our days typing on computers, cooking meals, doing laundry, changing diapers, studying for exams, and having very regular conversations. Most people don’t see these things on display; they happen quietly and are soon forgotten.

Compared to the Instagram-worthy spiritual life I am often tempted to seek, this life seems a little bit boring.

That said, in a world where we’re constantly encouraged to “seize the day” and “make a dent in the universe,” it’s inspiring to see how the very simple and ordinary life of one family so radically and completely reshaped the world.

Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to reformat my spiritual life to look a little more Nazareth and a little less Instagram. In all honesty, it’s usually not that interesting. I wake up at more or less the same time every day, do more or less the same thing in my personal prayer, and then go about my tasks for the day. There are certainly moments of “power” and “breakthrough,” but they come a lot less often and I’m learning to be okay with that.

The Holy Family models perfectly for us what a spiritual life should be. It usually wasn’t flashy or out of the ordinary - it involved doing everyday life things exceedingly well with great love for God and for one another. It was monotonous and hidden, marked by a profound unity.

It’s in these places though that God most wants to sanctify us. Dallas Willard famously said that “God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.” Like the Holy Family, the ordinariness of everyday life and the task of true love for those around us is the place where God wants to do most of His blessing. He doesn’t withhold His grace for the moments of high drama - they are available to us everywhere. This is the great lesson the Holy Family has for us and a particularly powerful invitation in the hustle and bustle of modern life.

Perhaps we will find that the soul work God does in ordinary life is even deeper than that He works in the exciting moments and perhaps, like the Holy Family, the fruit of our commitment to love amidst monotony will change the world too.