In one of my favourite stories, a man is on the lam, running from his brother, and so down on his luck that he has to stop in the middle of a journey through the wilderness and use a rock as a pillow. While upon that pillow, he has a crazy dream–a stairway to heaven moment, if you will–then awakens in his makeshift campsite to see it with new eyes; specifically, to see it as a “gate of heaven.” A place with God’s fingerprints just all over the place, indeed where God is totally hanging out, unbeknownst to the man, pre-rock pillow.

We went camping a couple of weekends ago, our second visit to the same site with the same group, and though no rocks were used as pillows (fine, we went glamping, our tents were already set up when we got there, sue me), it was definitely my definition of roughing it. Sure, there were hot showers available and a cafe onsite, but my phone lay uncharged much of the time and I peed in a creek. Roughing it. Not a place where you look around and think, God? Oh yeah, he’s TOTALLY here. Right beside this pile of horse shit, probs.

I tend to see glory in more…luxurious settings. Natural ones, sure, but natural ones with…amenities. Down pillows rather than rock ones. Spacious marble showers instead of cement stalls with a grate on the floor. This trip has become a tradition because of the company we keep while on it, and the fact that the kids love it, and I do too–really!–but I tend to agree with The Sis, who once said, “If God wanted us to camp, then why did he invent hotels?”

I wonder how many other places I’ve been prone to skipping out on glory because the accomodaysh, as it were, may have been subpar.

By the time I post this, I will have survived–God willing–two days and 280 questions of a dental exam to be licensed (licenced) to practice (practise) dentistry in Australia. Yay. I will have passed or failed it, though I won’t know for several weeks. My head is (temporarily) overflowing–or at least reasonably cluttered–with facts about dentures and implants and periodontal disease, while on the side I’m planning attendance at lectures on linguistics and sorting out my slides for talks on autism at The Kid and Little Brother’s school and reading books like this one (how great is that title?!). Stoking the fires of my passion while tolerating the fumes of rotting teeth and expecting glory in both places, simply because I’ve been around long enough to be proven wrong when I only expect God to appear at the Four Seasons, aka The Places I’d Rather Be Rather Than a Testing Centre at 8am Running Dental Scenarios on a Computer Screen.

If God is in this Chili’s, then he can be at a Pearson VUE testing centre. He can be in all the places I missed before–campsites, the world of disability, advocacy work, moments spent arguing with TK for the 569th time over why he has to brush his teeth. I just found him, matter of fact, in my own internalised ableism, something that showed up when I took this ten-minute test and realised that the way I’ve been defining my own worth by my productivity for much of my life has contributed to a mindset that marginalises those whose bodies don’t work the way mine does. Since those early days of equating myself with my accomplishments, though, I’ve had the opportunity (read: been forced by grace) to experience and stay in discomfort: mine at first, when I began to realise, and finally accept, that some of my parenting experiences would be out of range of the “norm” (whatever the hell that means), then others, as I finally offloaded my awkwardness onto people who hadn’t gotten that access code* yet.

So now I’m looking for glory just everywhere, for God to have his handprints on just everything. Cement stalls, glitter-strewn pride parades, photos of rotten teeth, meltdowns, fights and apologies–it’s like a scavenger hunt full of surprises, this grace that hides in the spots we’d least expect it then pops out, leaving us full of wonder: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God.”

*the one where we’ve stopped pretending like normal exists and, instead, we just let everyone be who they are and it’s a wonderful mess