This summer, I attended a John Legend concert with a few friends.  At this concert, he sang one of my favorite songs, called “Ordinary People.”  All the way home from that concert, I sang the chorus at the top of my lungs as I played that song over and over again loud enough to drown out my own singing. “We’re just ordinary people, we don’t know which way to go. ‘Cause we’re ordinary people, maybe we should take it slow, take it slow, oh oh ohhh…” The words of that refrain have stuck with me for weeks now. “‘Cause we’re ordinary people, maybe we should take it slow.”

I, like many of my peers in divinity school, spent this summer in CPE, where I worked as a hospital chaplain.  In that time, I spent hours with ordinary people: a twenty-four year old heart transplant patient, an 89-year-old mother of seven, a family gathered around the bedside of their dying loved one, a 73-year-old man who had just bought a flashy new motorcycle.  Room after room, I met them, and they invited me in.  I didn’t do much, really.  I listened, that’s about it.  But, I was amazed at how, in just a matter of minutes, many of them shared their life stories, their deepest fears, their most lonely sorrow, and even their hopeful joy.  Just ordinary people.  But, there was nothing at all ordinary about our time together.

This summer I discovered that the hospital is one of the best examples of organized chaos there probably is.  Nurses, doctors, and lab techs bounce in and out of patient rooms all the time.  Just as one leaves, the next seems to arrive with more questions and more tests, only to vanish again after collecting the needed data.  My role, however, was not to buzz in and out of patient rooms gathering information.  My role, as John Legend reminded me, was to “take it slow, oh oh ohhh.”  So I tried.  I pulled up a chair next to the bed where the patient was lying, and in one way or another, I said, “I have all the time that you need, how are you today…really?” The patient slowly begin to speak. The rush of the hospital frenzy faded away, and a sacredness set in, as if to say, “Take the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5).

Reflecting on this experience got me wondering about Moses’ encounter with the Divine at the burning bush.  What if Moses hadn’t taken the time to pause, remove his shoes, and listen?  He was, in fact, was off lookingfor his wandering sheep when he came across the bush. He was busy. He had other things to do.  “Take off my sandals?!” He may have said instead. “Come on, who has time for that?  I’m only going to have to put them back on in a minute or two.  And can’t you just skip the whole genealogy thing, you know, all that ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ stuff, and give the bullet points instead?  Twitter only allows for 140 characters for a reason.  Come on, already, spit it out.”  Or maybe this is just our reply when we have a chance to encounter sacredness.

But by replying this way, Moses would have missed it.  He would have missed the Divine intimacy of this encounter and the magnitude of it.  Just like we all do, far too often.  And–like Moses–we all have our own stuff going on.  We are busy trying to provide for ourselves and for others; we are busy worrying about the health of our loved ones; we are busy advocating for social change and equality; and we are busy withdeadlines, and reports, and budgets and…the list seems to go on and on.  But I wonder when will we realize that we’re just ordinary people?  And that maybe we should take it slow, remove our shoes, and acknowledge the sacred ground that emerges when ordinary people pause to hear and to be heard.  We’re starved for that.  We crave that sacredness.  We long for someone to mean it when they ask “How are you?,” and we feel least alone when others invite us into their stories as well.

I was lucky that my busyness–my job this summer–required me to slow down.  I had the luxury of getting to pull up that chair and really meaning it when I said “I have all the time that you need.”  But now that I am back to school, I feel that other kind of busyness once again setting in.

However,I don’t think we need to be chaplains in order to take off our shoes, inviting such sacred moments. In looking back on my childhood, the most sacred memories I have happened around the dinner table with my family.  No matter how packed full of activities our evening seemed to be–between 4-H meetings, basketball games, church activities, music lessons, you name it–we somehow seemed to slow down almost every night, long enough to have dinner together.  I’m sure there were many nights we missed, or many where we sat down for only a few moments before bolting out the door, but my memory holds the countless other nights–the nights where dad would come home, and we would all gather at the table, slowing down to take each other’s hands, and pray. It was in those moments that we removed our shoes and made time to truly hear one another.  We talked about everything around that table, and we still do.  It is the thing I look forward to most when I am home: sitting around the table for hours, barefoot.

And, there always comes a time when we need leave the table.  We put our shoes back on, and we part ways to go about our busyness.  But by slowing down, even if it’s just for a few moments, we welcome sacredness.

We’re all just ordinary people.  How might we make time to take it slow, removing our shoes to acknowledge that the ground on which we stand together is sacred?