Many of us run our lives out of a calendar and if you look at one long enough, you can see patterns and priorities. Work gets labeled a green color and family gets yellow, and before long every hour of the week has been sorted into its proper box. 

Hopefully, somewhere in there sits time for Mass.

The system works: busy people keep their commitments straight. It’s also easy to look at the Mass block and feel that God’s share has been set aside, so the rest of the week can belong to us.

Hm. 

Let’s look at a typical Tuesday afternoon, when a meeting runs long and the person across the table is testing your patience; the thought of bringing God into things might feel slightly out of place in this moment, as if he were a guest who wandered into the wrong room of the house.

Similarly the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus with this same dichotomy when they handed him a coin and asked about taxes. He asked whose image was stamped on it, and when they answered Caesar, he told them to give Caesar what was his and give God what was God’s. The coin carried Caesar’s face, and each of us carries God’s, made in his image.

Think of the calendar differently: its hours are the life of someone who belongs to God, which makes the Tuesday meeting as much his as the hour in the pew. 

Think of your annoying co-worker differently too: they may be testing your patience but they also carry the same image you do, stamped there by the same hand. Your Tuesday afternoon meeting starts to look like a place where God has been present all along.

To be clear, I’m not asking you to cram more religion into an already full week; what I’m asking for is a perspective shift: God already has the whole week, and what he’s after is our awareness that he’s in it with us. 

There’s a Catholic habit for exactly this, called the Morning Offering, where you hand the coming day to God before it begins, the meetings and errands and conversations included, trusting that ordinary work offered to him becomes something he can use. It can be as simple as saying, ‘Lord, everything I do today is yours.’

This week’s invitation: Pick one ordinary block on your calendar, something routine like a weekly meeting or the grocery run, and before it starts, offer it to God in a single sentence: This hour is yours. Then go about it as you normally would, paying attention to the people you meet along the way as bearers of His image. This small habit closes the distance between Sunday and the rest of the week. The ordinary hours begin to carry the shape of an offering.

The coin went back to Caesar, and he was welcome to it. What God asked for was worth far more: the people he made in his own image, and every ordinary hour they carry that image into the world, whether in a conference room or a checkout line.