How Was Your Day?

This question is so simple.  Yet it begs of much, much more.

I was listening to NPR on my short drive to school this week.  On the news was an interview with astronaut Mark Kelly talking about Rep. Gabby Giffords' recovery.  Kelly says how hard it is to be in conversation with someone who cannot ask a question.  He described how her speech was so severely impaired that she was unable to ask any question for months.  Until one day. 

The first question Giffords asked was, "How was your day?"

"It was a big event," Kelly says. "It was so big to me, it completely locked my brain up — I could not remember one thing I did that day. So I had a hard time answering her. So she had this momentous event where she finally asked a question and I had no answer because I was so happy about it."

When I heard this piece of the interview, I nearly pulled over to the side of the road.  Emotionally, Kelly described a moment that was so sacred, so filled with simply love, so momentous for them both in her recovery that it stopped him.  Time stopped. 

And I thought about how many times in the last half year that I have been able to sit across from my beloved and over dinner, ask, simply, "How was your day?"  In our exchanges, we catch up on the mundane and the silly and the sacred.  It's our time together - no TV, no cell phones, nothing but us.  Time stops.  How was your day?  It reminds me to count my blessings and to cherish how the Sacred shows up in ordinary ways, on God's time - kairos - the fullness of time.

I believe this happens in the Holy Eucharist.  We come to God's table and time stops.  We experience the sacred moment of transformation in that space, with those sacred elements.  We share our day with the One who was and is and is to come.  And God listens to our human attempt at responding to How Was Your Day.

And God offers faith, hope and Love. Glory!





How was your day?