I still remember when I began to daydream. I was adolescent and starting to get bored with my humdrum high school life. I recall unashamedly that I enjoyed levitating my mind to project myself as somebody I fancied—normally the hero or the prince charming of the drama I would play in my head. (Of course, I wouldn’t give up the lead role in my own mental production.)
Recalling this got me thinking how important it is to be fully rooted in the present.
We humans live in segments of space and time. Life is temporal with past, present and future. If we are to learn contentment and to experience joy we need to fully live in the present. We cannot change the past. It is there—an unchangeable reality. The past is not going to happen again. We cannot linger there. We can only gain wisdom from the lessons it teaches.
Among the three facets of time, the future is the most temporal of all. Unlike the past, from our perspective (not God’s) the future is not even a reality. Living in the future is worse than living in the past. It is with respect to the future that the devil’s deception is most strongly directed against us. He wants to snuff contentment in our life and rob us of our joy. And there is no better way of doing that than by pushing us to live in our dreams. He doesn’t want us to relish life that God has given us now. He makes us focus on the future, which leaves our hearts discontented and makes us long to escape the present.
Many of us are camping in our dreams and so miss the blessings of the present. We have succumbed to excessive ambition and drive to succeed and have made the present a springboard to some future dream instead of a stage for enjoying what God has given us. In so doing we allow the present to fly quickly by and thereby miss much of life with our spouse, children, friends, work and, more importantly, God. We are so focused on where we want to end up that we gloss over where we are. The irony is that we never get to where we want to be because there is always somewhere else to go.
I submit that it is in the present where God meets us. It is now that the Holy Spirit is working in our hearts to transform us. It is only in the present where we can experience the joy, peace and love that God offers. God is eternity. The nearest that we could sample eternity in this life is to consider the present. God is in the eternal present. There is no past or future in Him. He deals with us today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. To the extent that we escape the present by either living in the past or, worse, escaping to the future, we will live a shallow and unfulfilled life. There’s nothing wrong with planning for the future, but we must stay rooted in the present. Being faithful and grateful here and now is what it means to forget what is behind and strain toward the goal to which God has called us heavenward.
We know that we’re living in the future when we worry too much about it. Jesus said let tomorrow worry about itself. He said this while pointing to the birds and the flowers. Clearly, as busy as Jesus was he spent time enjoying their beauty. We need to do the same.
Go and smell the followers and watch the birds. And don’t forget to bring your loved ones along. Time flies.
