Do you ever get to the end of your day and realize you spent the majority of it thinking about tomorrow, or next week, or next month? It seems harmless at first. We easily write off our preoccupation with the future as "being prepared" for what is to come or simply for the joy of what the future may bring. I do not want to condem either of those thought processes (mainly because I am the number one offender of them). I want to draw attention to what happens when we cannot pull away from the future and appreciate the present.
A priest once shared with me the following words of wisdom:
Imagine Jesus talking with you face-to-face. Instead of of you looking Him in the eyes as He speaks lovingly to you, you are preoccupied and looking over His shoulder, looking at everything else that passes behind Him. This is what you are doing every day that you spend concerned, worried, and disrupted about what is to come. The more time you spend "looking over the shoulder of Jesus" the more you miss the graces He is giving you today.
My situation in life has inspired the thoughts of this blog post. My fiance, Bryce, and I dated for three years before getting engaged. It was not much past our two year anniversary that I started thinking about when he would propose. There were many people around me taking that major step in their relationships, and I could not help but wonder and imagine what it would be like if it was happening to me. The harm was not in the wonder that I had but the way that it disrupted my peace and my ability to appreciate the present. And today, I find myself doing the same thing, again! Our wedding is a mere 45 days away! Obviously, I have been planning, preparing, thinking ahead, etc...in order to make sure everything is set for our big day. Rightly so, I cannot stop thinking about being married! Yet, these next 45 days are a tremendous blessing! They are the last days I have to prepare for marriage, for being a wife; the last days I will spend "single." And there is beauty in that! Our wedding day will come and go. Time does not stop (in case you haven't noticed) and it continues at the same speed, every day. I don't want to look back and wish that I would have paid more attention to what was happening in my life during those 45 days leading up to the wedding. Those 45 days are a gift from God and it would be awful of me to not appreciate that gift and only wish it away for the future.
Maybe I am the only one who gets stuck in this peace-disrupting, forward thinking. I hope I'm not. In any case, this post is to serve as a reminder to all of us to find beauty and blessing in the present, in where we are. Not where we want and hope to be. It is an act of trusting that God's will will be done tomorrow and resting in that trust.
Again, I am not asking you to carelessly "neglect the future."
Where are you right now? Are you stuck thinking about what you want you life to look like in the future? Are you influenced by the lives of those around you, to the point of it disrupting your peace and missing what God has to show you today? Are you focusing so much on that future event that you have been planning for that you just wish it were here already?
Wherever you are, acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ, that He may be able to speak to you today, bless you today, and provide a resting place for your heart, today.
