No one told me college would be harder when it got easier.

As a junior PWID student at Cedarville University, I feel like I’ve finally found my feet after freshman year sent me reeling. The friendships I planted in the darkness of that time are blooming in the light now, and my relationship with the Lord has grown stronger than I ever thought possible. Every day, I get to attend classes that I enjoy, work a job that I love, and do life alongside people I care about. And yet, despite all these blessings, I’m finding it difficult to simply do the mundane task of moving forward.

I know it’s part of being human. For some reason, we humans like the challenge and adventure of the hard times far more than we do just living in the simple day-to-day routines of life. People all over the world travel, move, break up, change jobs, and challenge themselves because they want more than just the everyday mundane. And while this desire can be used for good, no one in life can avoid mundane seasons. And if we try, we only end up cheating ourselves.

Because God has commanded us to do our best in every circumstance, I’m beginning to trust that He can work in me for His glory even in the mundane.

As I trudge through a pile of assignments, a handful of discussion posts, and mountains of emails this semester, it can be easy for me to slack off. “It doesn’t matter that much,” I mumble as I turn away from words and ideas that I’ve left dangling in my latest discussion post. These assignments and responsibilities can quickly become an opportunity for me to hoard my time and my words, rather than giving my best.

Yet by doing that, I miss what Scripture clearly says about our role. As believers, we are called to do all things to the glory of God. This requires doing everything to the best of our ability, even if “everything” is just the same simple, beautiful things that we do over and over, day after day. The mundane still deserves our best.

And I know that my best is far better than what I’ve been giving. My time in PWID has sharpened my skills beyond what I could have ever imagined. From the knowledge on writing cohesion I gained from Professional Editing to the wordcraft I developed in Copywriting to the sentence concision I studied in Style and Mechanics, I am more prepared than ever to use my writing for God’s glory.

But can God truly be glorified through a simple discussion post? What if it’s just an email that only my professor will ever read? How can any glory come from the mundane work of just doing one assignment after the other?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. And perhaps, that’s the point. As humans, how God works His glory has always been beyond our understanding. In the midst of my darkest seasons, I didn’t see how God could possibly get any glory, and yet now, looking back, I catch glimpses of what He was doing that leave me breathless.

I’m learning that the mundane is another place to trust Him. It’s another place to keep moving forward and giving my best. I may not see how writing for a discussion post, finishing up that assignment, or showing up day after day makes a difference. But I do know that He has promised to work all things for good.

So, I pick up my pen. I allow my words to come spilling from the tip, refining them over and over until what was a trickling stream becomes a flowing river. My words spill over onto all the pieces of mundane writing, pooling in streams that seem needlessly clear until the light catches them and they sparkle with reflected glory.