Water runs down my arms, drips off my elbows, and pools on the floor at my feet as I try to coax stubborn grease from dirty dishes with ineffective dish soap and frigid water. On any given day, I’d be whining in my mind about how hard the simple things can be here, but today, I am praying.

I hear the tattle tale sound of a hundred toothpicks hitting the floor as my ever-busy, now two-year-old son engages in his curiosity-satisfying destruction. On any given day, I’d lose my temper and shout at him, growling in frustration at yet another endless mess to clean. But today, I am praying.

I bend down on hands and knees and begin restoring toothpicks to their proper place, my back to the kitchen. Before the last few toothpicks can be rescued, I turn around only to catch a glimpse of my son elbow deep in a ten-pound sack of flour, a veritable snowfall surrounding his kneeling figure on the floor. On any given day, I’d shout through the house for reinforcements—“Amelia!! Come get your brother!!” And begin to sweep in angry, mess-exaggerating strokes as I grumbled under my breath our inside joke whenever I’m overwhelmed by the number of little people in our house, “James, we bought too many puppies!” But today, I am praying.

I grab the broom and bend to start scooping up flour into dustpan, and I smile wryly at Father’s sneaky way to enable me to be incognito, on my knees again—twice in less than 15 minutes. Today, He knows I am to be praying.

In my living room, mere yards away a smartly dressed young man, with nicely polished pointy shoes is sitting next to the love of my life, bent over the Bible–a precious love letter he doesn’t even know is addressed to him yet. In halting stammers he works his way through the story of a Garden, testing out the unfamiliar vocabulary, making sense of a story that doesn’t quite fit what he’s already been taught.

I like him already. Sometimes it takes days of praying before I feel the Father’s affection towards someone take root in my heart, but with this one, it snuck in much more quickly. A passerby in a coffee shop, he overheard two friends of mine talking about our Messiah and, unashamedly eavesdropping, he couldn’t help but join the conversation. “You’re talking about Jesus!? What a cool guy!” A sentiment not often heard here, my friend was understandably taken aback. “Why yes he is!” She felt prompted to get his phone number, but because she is a single woman here and he a single man she passed his number to my husband and now, here he was, sitting in my living room, drinking my tea and not eating the strawberry coffee cake I had made.

That he liked the person of Jesus was only the first in a series of startling revelations from his own heart. He proceeded to say many things about the faith practiced by most here that if overheard could land him in serious trouble. Despite the promising nature of his refusal to accept many of the basic tenants of the faith here he was also not ready to embrace the things we believe about the Son. But he was willing to read—tonight and again.

I have known in my head for a long time that in those long evenings when James is out of the house and I’m wrangling four children through dinners and baths and homework and fights and teeth-brushing and shouting matches and Bible story time and tickle fests and just-one-more’s and bed—that this is what he’s doing. Pouring over pages with a willing heart, fielding questions between sips of sweet hot tea, choosing hope instead of discouragement, putting himself out there to be rejected over and over again, listening to life stories poured out at inconvenient moments, all because the Life we have is worth it, but it’s a rare thing for it to be happening in my home, to be taking place within ear-shot of my life’s chaos. In fact, it’s rare for me to even have a face to go with a name! And even more rare that I have the sensitivity in my spirit to recognize these moments, and receive the gift that is having these two worlds collide, making sense of each other and why we are here, infusing my cold water dishwashing with purpose. And so, even though, my instincts and my flesh and the person I am on many other given days would be distracted and frustrated by the unending series of messes finding their way onto my kitchen floor, by His grace, in this moment, I’m finding reason to smile in the many opportunities to be on my knees, and I am praying.

-A worker in North Africa