The Theology of Ordinary Things

A Theology of the Commute

We treat the hours between home and work as dead time, a blank to be endured, deleted, or filled with distraction on the way to real life. But there is no dead time in a life that God is present in, and the in-between is not a gap between meaningful places; it can be a threshold, a passage where a person is quietly formed. Christ meets people on the road, and the commute may be less an interruption of your life than an unnoticed part of it.

Consider how you regard your commute: almost certainly as time to be gotten through. It is the buffer, the tax, the nothing you pay to get from where you sleep to where you earn. We fill it with podcasts, calls, and scrolling precisely because we experience it as empty, a void that must be plugged so we do not have to feel it. In the ledger of a modern day, the commute is entered as a loss.

This is a specific instance of a larger assumption: that life happens at the destinations, and the transit between them does not count. We divide our hours into productive time and wasted time, meaningful places and mere corridors, and the in-between falls into the second category by default. The commute becomes a stretch of life we have pre-decided not to actually live, which is a strange thing to do with a portion of your one finite existence.

How did whole hours come to be classified as disposable? As work and home separated into different places, often far apart, travel between them became a routine necessity, and anything that is routine and merely instrumental tends to slide beneath conscious attention. We learned to be absent from it, to treat the body's transit as a nuisance the mind should escape through distraction. The result is that a meaningful fraction of waking life gets lived on autopilot, filed under time that does not matter.

The cost of that filing is subtle but real. These are hours of your actual life, and to pre-classify them as dead is to consent to being absent from a piece of your own existence, day after day, for years. The commute could be a natural seam in the day, a space to decompress between roles, to notice the world, to pray, to arrive home as a person rather than a bundle of leftover work stress. Filled reflexively with noise, it becomes instead a conduit that carries the office into the kitchen and the anxieties of the day into the night.

The Christian instinct is that no time is godless, because God is not confined to sanctuaries and special moments. Much of the Gospel happens on roads and journeys; Christ is forever meeting people in transit, walking, traveling, encountered on the way somewhere. The Christian claims that a person is being formed at every moment, not only at the meaningful destinations, and that ordinary passages, the walk, the drive, the train, are exactly where a quiet, attentive life with God can be lived. The threshold is not less holy than the room.

The better way is not to ban podcasts or romanticize traffic, both of which miss the point. It is to stop pre-deleting the in-between. Sometimes let the commute be what it is: a passage. Use part of it in silence, or in prayer, or simply awake to the world going by, letting it become a threshold where you set down one role before picking up the next. Keep the good things you fill it with, but stop treating the time itself as nothing. It is not nothing. It is your life, in transit, and God is on the road.

If your days feel like a series of destinations with only dead time in between, a small rhythm of prayer in the in-between spaces can change how the whole day feels. Living Bread offers simple ways to bring Scripture and prayer into ordinary moments, including the ones you spend traveling. Consider letting one part of tomorrow's commute become a quiet appointment with God rather than a gap to be endured.