"If You're Living in the Future, You're Probably Lonely"

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.