THURSDAY, May 14 marks Ascension Day – the day when Jesus ascended to heaven 40 days after his resurrection.

There's a moment in that story that I have been thinking about. It’s when Jesus has just disappeared into a cloud, and the disciples are standing there, staring upward into the sky.

Two figures dressed in white appear beside them and ask: why do you stand here looking into the sky?

I recognise myself in this. Something momentous happens – or fails to happen – and we stand rooted to the spot, gazing at where it was, waiting for it to come back, not yet able to turn and face the everyday that’s in front of us. Comparing what was or what might be, with what is.

The instruction the disciples receive is a practical one: go back, wait together, stay in the city.

They are not told to ascend to a higher plane, or achieve enlightenment, or relocate somewhere more spiritually promising. Perhaps that’s what they were expecting, but what they hear is different: go home, be with each other, and pay attention to ordinary days.

It's May, and hawthorn is blossoming along every Devon lane – a wild generosity of creamy white. But it's still easy to feel that real life is somewhere out there, over the next hill, in a more vivid version of the present moment.

We can miss the hawthorn doing its extraordinary ordinary thing because we’re waiting for the next thing to bloom, the next sign of life.

We can spend a lot of time waiting for our lives to begin, never really seeing what’s in front of us.

The Christian tradition resists this. Its central claim is not that meaning is elsewhere – in a heaven we must escape toward, or a golden past we can recover – but that it is here, hidden in what is ordinary and close.

The 14th century mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, writing during the years of the black death, kept returning to small things: a hazelnut in a cupped hand, or a neighbour's face.

Earlier mystic and abbess Hildegard of Bingen found the whole of divine energy in the greening of the present world.

Whatever we're waiting for – a resolution, a sign, a better season – there is often something already in front of us waiting to be noticed.

Perhaps a conversation, or a kindness, or an invitation, or hawthorn blooming on a Thursday morning in May.

Right now, when so much in the world asks us to look elsewhere – to celebrities, or technology that promises to make life easier, or to the different life that we might live if we just hustle a bit harder – this is not a small thing.

Perhaps it is God saying, I am here, now, in the extraordinary everyday.

Elizabeth Lloyd

Crediton Congregational Church