There’s a dangerously elusive misconception that’s been
plaguing my existence ever since I started to grapple with the concept of the
future as a separate dimension from the present. It has loomed over my head and
my shoulders, quietly watching my movements like a cat, lingering in heavy black
clouds of apprehension and breathlessness. Its bulky uncertainty consumes my
joy; it shoves my peace into compact balls of “When” and “If”, scattering their
figures across the pool table of “Might Be’s” and “Maybes”. It whispers its
inaudible echoes across my heart and invades all my dreams and wishes, taking
them captive into the darkness where it resides. It knows all the good things
we long for and all the pain and hurt we love to hold on to. It holds the keys
to our ambition and our purpose, our love, joy and our hope because we gave
them to him, open handed because we were too busy to use in the present or to
notice they were even gone. I am talking about those dark words, “When I _____,
I will______”. Insert dreams, insert callings, insert any aspiration you have
intimately knit together with anticipation and longing.
“Someday, when I____.” Insert all your infinite plans, and
hopes, all your distant goals that trail off, out of reach and like ethereal ghosts
we can’t hold onto, like wandering ships on blurred horizons. “Someday”, the
demon of apathetic dreamers and mediocre magicians. And perhaps even more sinister,
its accomplice “I am Waiting To____” fills in the gaps where “When I” pours too
lightly to mingle it all together into cocktails of indifference and inaction. That
misconception is a poison I have been freely drinking from far too long.
Why do we wait to live until it’s too late?
How many infinite conditional statements can we make before we
are forced to drink our own bitter regret? My fear is that God, being the
gentleman that He is, can only present us with so many “presents” before our
continued rejection of our present opportunities are embarrassing. Our Father,
whose priceless gifts He has purchased with His own blood, sit idly in the
attic of our “intention” collecting dust and disappointment. But even if no one
saw the Mona Lisa, or paid thousands of dollars to travel to the Louvre to look
upon its creator’s genius, would still be a masterpiece.
I am talking about your life.
When I was a
little girl I remember living right “here”, where my feet touched the ground,
firmly planted and blooming in the “right now”. “Here”, where my heartbeat with fresh blood
every day and my head swam with galaxies and wonder. No one had told me yet
that I would have to be five million different people before graduating college
or that I would live a hundred different prospective lives in my head before
making a decision about my future.
And what does all that mean, anyway? The Future. Where is it? I don’t think it really exists, have you
been there? But the ironic truth is that we talk about it like we are already
there, living on remote islands of the future, stuck in our heads and out of
touch with where our physical body is and what our eyes are truly seeing on the
mainland. And tragically, some people are forever shipwrecked, and what a
miserable waste, because everyone else is still here. What wasted love, trampled flowers, shattered porcelain.
This big, ethereal “future”, I think it’s just a silly
abstract lie that keeps people painfully unhappy, or worse, isolated and alone.
Because right now, at this very moment are where all the endless possibilities
are waltzing around us and we cant keep turning down perfectly good dances to
be a wallflower in life. I keep telling myself, “I’ll be happy when _____” and
“I’ll do this if ____” but that just doesn’t exist. Can you touch it, can you
kiss “maybes” and “ifs” on the cheek and be riveted? I am not propagating
hedonism nor am I advocating a Godless, reckless life. What I am saying is,
that I think it glorifies God when we live in the adventure He has crafted for
us. If you’re bored, you’re doing the whole “being a Christian thing wrong.”
Living for God should be the most exciting journey you’ll ever take. It
requires bravery and necessitates relationships, and dare I say it, risk. We
don’t do it alone on islands. He has given us a team and He has given us seeds.
Open up your eyes and look around you.
You cant live for God in the future, you wont do anything
for Him. It will forever evade you. He can’t and won’t say “Well done”, nor can
He pat you on the back and say, “Great intentions, Bob”.
Not even God can actualize
your intent unless you give Him your hands and feet.
No. We can only live moment-by-moment, stitch-by-stitch,
sewing our souls into the perfect will of God. And someday, when we look back
on the vibrant threads of our past, and our present and behold the tapestry we
have knitted with those we love, we shall find that we have lived an entire
life in the will of God. And it will be priceless, this life we have spun, this
quilt we have crafted by grace.
