NeuroDivine

For my godmother, who helped to teach me the liturgy of a day’s work.

This evening, while paying for a few things in the local garage, I noticed a member of staff wrapping bundles of returned Sunday newspapers. It was a perfectly ordinary task, one I have seen countless times before.

But it carried me unexpectedly back almost three decades.

When I was a teenager, I used to help in my godmother’s newsagent, News Rack, back home in Ballymena. Part of the Sunday routine was collating newspapers—assembling the various sections of the Sunday papers into complete copies before customers arrived. The Sunday Times seemed especially endless, with its supplements, magazines, and inserts. In the evening, of course, came the returns, tying up the unsold copies and preparing them to go back.

For a few moments, standing in the shop, I could almost smell the newsprint again.

I mentioned this to the two young men working there. We laughed together about it. Then came the startling realisation: it was twenty-eight years ago.

Neither of them had been born when I was collating those papers. One would not arrive for another four years. The other was still more than a decade away, some twelve years in the future.

It is a strange thing when a memory remains vivid while the calendar quietly accumulates decades around it. In my mind, those Sunday mornings do not feel especially distant. I can still remember the rhythm of the work, the weight of the papers, the satisfaction of getting the bundles ready before the customers arrived. Yet enough time has passed for an entire generation to have grown up between then and now.

As we talked, I found myself wondering how many small jobs quietly disappear. The world of newspapers has changed beyond recognition. News now arrives on glowing screens carried in our pockets. Many people no longer buy a Sunday paper at all. Yet for years, there was a whole hidden choreography behind every copy sold: delivery drivers, shopkeepers, early starts, collated sections, tied bundles, and returned papers heading back at the end of the day.

Most of it was ordinary work. Few people noticed it. Yet it mattered.

Perhaps that is true of much of life.

We often imagine that meaning is found in the great milestones—the graduations, weddings, achievements, and anniversaries. Yet some of the memories that stay with us longest are the small ones. A Saturday job. A familiar routine. A conversation behind a shop counter. A task repeated so often that it became part of who we were without our ever noticing.

The Christian faith teaches us that God is found not only in the dramatic and spectacular but also in the ordinary. Bread and wine. Water and oil. Fishing boats and village wells. The kingdom of God, Jesus suggests, is often hidden in plain sight.

Perhaps that is why moments like this catch us by surprise. A bundle of returned newspapers becomes a doorway into memory. An ordinary conversation becomes a reminder of how swiftly the years have passed. Two young men laugh at a story from before they were born, and suddenly time itself feels both longer and shorter than we imagined.

The young man wrapping returns tonight was simply doing his job.

Yet for a moment, I was nineteen again, standing behind the counter of a small newsagent, learning that ordinary work has its own dignity and rhythm.

The years pass more quickly than we expect. But perhaps that is why such moments matter. They remind us that our lives are woven not only from the great events we remember to celebrate, but also from countless ordinary moments that quietly shape us.

And sometimes, when we least expect it, one of those moments returns carrying the surprising news that twenty-eight years have gone by.