For the weeks of September 13 through October 4, 2026
Infinitus Ministries
Welcome back to Offbeat Expeditions! We began this “DIY, choose-your-own-adventure micro-worship” program a year ago, but it went on hiatus in November of 2025. Back then, we put out a weekly PDF, but it proved both work-intensive and tedious after two months. Putting OEx back online was one of my priorities.
This new iteration of OEx is monthly (since a majority of content in the weekly editions was quite repetitive) and is published on Notion. We acknowledge that many people access the content on their mobile devices, and Notion provides adaptability whether they would like to print out our guide or use it on their tablets, smartphones, or desktop computers.
Although this micro-worship guide is designed for individuals, primarily autistic and AuDHD persons who may not feel safe attending a conventional church service for a variety of reasons, it is also designed for use in small groups and families. If you are using this guide for your small group, please let us know by writing an email or via Matrix at @willow:unredacted.org.
OEx is a dispersed community united in spirit. Please register your participation at https://form.jotform.com/252435600946053, and you will gain access to our new, private Matrix space! What’s Matrix? It is an online collaboration platform similar to Slack and Discord. For more information and tutorials, check out https://www.infinitusministries.net/chat.
This month (through October 4), you are encouraged to define, create, and cultivate a space you can call a sacred place. This may be a special prayer spot you find in your backyard or a nearby nature park, or a little altar on a table. A sacred space is both spatial and temporal in intention: it is not about how ornate or intricate it looks, but about creating a sacred space and moment you can go back to as a touchstone.
One of the themes underlying the Hebrew Scriptures (also known as Tanakh, or the “Old” Testament) is the demarcation between what is “sacred” and what is “profane.” While this feels overly dualistic by our modern sensibility, marking time and space by designating special places and moments is not entirely foreign to us. Many of us appreciate the winter holidays and related traditions. Maybe we look forward to a summer day at a beach or campground. Some enjoy festivals that take their participants to a special world different from the mundane, such as Burning Man, Renaissance Faire, and Oregon Country Fair. In these spaces, time moves at a different speed, and what we experience there becomes a lot more memorable than what happens in our ordinary lives. When you have a special time and space, you also start to rearrange and realign the rest of your life.
Do you remember when you were 10 years old? You probably felt like one week was forever. As grown-ups, the older we get, the faster time appears to pass. One week ago feels like yesterday. Before we know it, an entire year is gone.
I was thinking about why that might be, and I have a little hypothesis: when you were in elementary school, each day is structured into slots of 40 to 50 minutes (depending on schools), and in each slot, you engage in a different activity. There are also small rituals to mark the transitions of time throughout the day. At 9 a.m., you may be solving a math problem. At 11:30 a.m., you’re in the lunchroom. At 1 p.m., you may be playing volleyball. Then after school, some kids might spend an hour or two in a swim lesson or a ballet studio or learning how to play a musical instrument. Then you go home, perhaps play with your friend, perhaps watch TV, then eat dinner. A child simply has a lot more variety in what they do in a day, and at each of these moments, they only focus on one task at hand. In contrast, an adult life feels like everything is lumped into one big mush of time, and that mush carries over to the next day, adding more to itself. Before you know it, a few years have gone by. This has gotten a lot worse since the start of the pandemic almost seven years ago.
In much of today’s North American culture, we seem to have lost the sense of sacred. Contemporary or modern worship services of many churches resemble either a rock concert or a coffee house with live music performances. (I am not saying this is all negative; as an autistic individual, I actually prefer this type of service over high-church liturgical services myself.) Too often, attending a service can become just another thing we do on a weekend among other activities: get in, sit through, get out, and off to the hiking trail, Sunday brunch, or a shopping mall. We might not even remember much of the sermon 30 minutes after we left the service.
Recently, I was reading an article from a Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) priest that addresses newcomers who are unfamiliar with how Orthodox Christianity worships. On its surface, it looks like just a lot of rules: how to dress, where to stand, who can take communion and how. Newcomers might feel overwhelmed and puzzled by all this. But as I read it, I began to understand how they are creating a time and space that is out of this world, distinguished from the ordinary drudgery of life. It looks strange to outsiders precisely because that is the intention and the point. Similar things can be said of pre-Vatican II Catholic masses in Latin, high-church Anglican Eucharistic services, and Orthodox Jewish synagogues; they have beautiful but “antiquated” rituals in an old language we don’t use. While the Protestant Reformation emphasized the use of vernacular languages and eliminated many rituals and symbols it deemed “unbiblical,” the extreme end of this was where the sacred moment becomes no longer distinguishable from the rest of our daily lives.
To avoid any misunderstanding, however, I am not advocating a return to tradition, nor do I believe that high-church liturgical services are superior. However, in this month of OEx, I’d like to challenge all participants to mindfully look around their own world and identify ways to create (or sanctify) a small corner of it into a place where they encounter the divine.
One biblical inspiration for this project is the ancient tabernacle described in Exodus chapters 25 through 31. A tabernacle was a mobile temple used by the ancient Hebrews while they wandered through the wilderness as they moved from Egypt to the promised land. While God was present everywhere, the tabernacle and its rituals, rich in symbolism, reminded the Israelites that their God lived among them and moved with them as they journeyed across the Sinai Peninsula under hostile terrain and harsh climate.
The New Interpreter’s Study Bible comments on this Exodus passage: [The tabernacle functioned as] “axis mundi, the central point of creation where heaven and earth link.” (p. 122.) The challenge we offer you this month is to create your own “central point” where the earthly meets the heavenly.
Over the next four weeks, each of us will be creating our own sacred place that works as a reminder of the divine presence and our oneness with it.