What if folding laundry or doing the dishes could become sacred rituals? In this episode of Good Faith, Curtis Chang is joined by Every Moment Holy author Douglas McKelvey to discuss how Christian liturgy can transform our daily routines into holy moments. Rooted in a deep understanding of spiritual rhythms and the power of habit, their conversation invites listeners to discover divine presence in midst of the ordinary.

McKelvey reminds us that our entire lives can be infused with purpose, not just the mountaintop moments. Whether in chaos and faith, or silence and stillness, each act can be reimagined through the lens of God’s redemption.

Through thoughtfully crafted prayers, McKelvey leads listeners into a posture of awareness, where even mundane tasks reflect faithfulness and point us toward eternal life. This isn’t just about discipline, it’s about art and storytelling: seeing our lives as narratives shaped by grace, grief, joy, and resurrection.

Drawing inspiration from the Psalms and deeply rooted in resurrection theology, the episode offers a way of navigating chaos by anchoring ourselves in something timeless. It’s a gentle, powerful reminder that every breath, every chore, every pause holds potential for sacred encounter.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.

Curtis Chang: As I was listening to you read this liturgy, I felt like this was giving expression to some things that I was feeling for this particular moment in our society, so thank you for that. I was also struck that the liturgy does not close by saying ‘oh God, take this all away, make the chaos go all away, make everything fine again.’ Say more why you didn’t end the liturgy that way.

Douglas McKelvey: I think the inclination to want to tidy things up and put a bow on them at the end is something that I shed decades ago, because at a certain point life no longer allows us to feel like that is an authentic expression. Grace is real and God’s mercy is real, and His love is real. But those are not feel-good platitudes, those are hard-won truths that required incarnation and sweat and blood and tears, and our experience of life mirrors that.

If we look again at the Psalms as our reference points, David so often begins by being brutally honest about the place he’s in, the betrayals he’s suffered, the dangers he’s facing, the enemies who are actively pursuing him, and then he reminds his own heart of what he has experienced in the past: that God has been faithful.

But he sometimes will still end the prayer in a way that’s authentic to the place that he’s in, where he’s waiting expectantly and he is turning the expression into doxology, praising God for His past faithfulness and looking towards the future redemption of his situation. But he doesn’t resort to easy answers. We most often have to sit in some difficult seasons for a long period of time and to learn what it means to trust God in the midst of something that we actually can’t control.