This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have

A simple mantra to change everything: discover how to encounter God in your everyday, and practice extraordinary presence in an ordinary life. What if the life we long for isn’t elsewhere but rather right here, waiting to be discovered?

Joshua Luke Smith believes the greatest lie facing our generation is that the life we long for lies beyond the life that we have. We so easily learn to disdain the inconveniences, interruptions, and messy mundane that infuses our everyday. But the real transformation happens when we look at our life as it is and dare to announce: This is the main event.

With devotional depth, prophetic wisdom, and poetic storytelling, This Is the Main Event is your invitation to awaken to the sacred in your ordinary life. As Joshua claims, the extraordinary life is simply the one in which we practice presence—to ourselves, to others, to God. Every moment becomes meaningful when you recognize the God who meets you in it—a holy encounter accessed in the everyday.

Whether you’re packing lunches, paying bills, headed to the office or the hospital or a recovery meeting, God comes to you in the shape of your actual life. Joshua Luke Smith writes from the raw materials of his own ordinary life—toddler tuck-ins, recovery meetings, flat tires a mile from home—to speak to yours.

For anyone wearied by the workaday grind, this is a book to help you receive the greatest gift you already have and to practice your own aliveness in your actual life.

© 2026 HarperOne (Audiobook): 9780063475205

Release date

Audiobook: July 28, 2026