God Never Gives the Future
I met a sentence the other day that has been bothering me—in a good way.
“God, the master of time, never gives the future.”
Read that again. Did your mind immediately go to the future? Mine did.
I have plans for today. Plans for tomorrow. Appointments, meetings, deadlines, things I need to remember, and several things I have already forgotten. All of them are carefully placed on my calendar. Notice the possessive pronoun.
My calendar.
That is how we talk, as though we own Tuesday. We look at a little square on a screen three weeks from now and say, “I have something that day.”
Maybe.
As we say in the South, “The Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.”
Calendars are good things. Planning is responsible. But putting something on a calendar does not mean we possess the day. God has given us this moment. The next one remains in his hands. One of the hardest skills in life is learning to be fully present in the moment we have. We have two favorite ways of avoiding it.
The first is the past.
We call them “the good old days.” The funny thing about the good old days is that when we were living through them, we complained about them too. Personally, I vote for the late 1970s—but only after the leisure suit phase. There are some things even nostalgia cannot redeem.
We remember our younger years as simpler times, conveniently forgetting that we were younger, considerably less wise, and occasionally wearing polyester. Sometimes we look backward because we regret mistakes. Sometimes because we miss people. Sometimes because we realize we were standing in a wonderful moment and didn’t recognize how wonderful it was until it was gone.
Our other escape route is the future. We worry about everything we have to do. We stare at our calendar and wonder who put all that stuff on there, conveniently ignoring the fact that most of the appointments were made by us.
Or we are waiting for something wonderful.
At one point, I was looking ahead to the possibility of praying the invocation at the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony. That was exciting. So there I was, supposedly contemplating the spiritual discipline of living in the present while simultaneously thinking about the 1970s, imagining a future event, examining my calendar—and receiving texts from church staff reminding me of a couple of things I needed to do. I was apparently fully present in about four different decades at once.
It was a busy moment. And now it is gone. That may be the spiritual lesson.
The only moment in which you can love somebody is this one. The only moment in which you can pray is this one. The only moment in which you can notice grace is this one. The only moment in which you can actually live is this one.
We remember the past. We prepare wisely for the future. But we receive life from God now.
So try something. For the next two minutes, be completely present. Don’t revisit yesterday. Don’t rehearse tomorrow. Don’t check your phone. Don’t mentally reorganize your calendar. Just be here.
Now.
If you make it the full two minutes, congratulations. You may already be more spiritually mature than I am. If you don’t, notice which direction your mind traveled.
Did you go backward or forward?
I have a theory that I can come pretty close to guessing your age by which direction you went. When we’re young, we keep asking, “What’s next?” As we get older, we increasingly ask, “Remember when? “Faith may teach us to ask a different question:
“God, what are you doing right here?”
Because God, the master of time, has not given us tomorrow.
But he has given us this moment.
And this moment is enough.
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