LIIVING IN THE HERE AND NOW NOT THE THERE AND THEN Part 2

This morning I hiked the beautiful Kapalua trail along the coast of West Maui. The trade winds were blowing with a pleasant cool breeze to tone down the hot Maui sun. The ocean water was so blue, the land is rich and fertile full of wildlife and so is so beautiful to behold. A perfect place to commune with God in nature, right? Wrong! Much of my walk was consumed with looking back on my past (which I wrote about last week. You see, I myself am trying to practice what I wrote to you :) ) and looking ahead to my highly uncertain future. Where will I live in three months? Will God open the door to plant a church? How will I pay my bills? Will my life be good and happy? And on and on and on :( Fortunately, I was able to practice what I am writing and had a wonderful time of communion with God that alleviated all my thoughts about the past and future.

I said last week that in the truest sense, right here and right now is all we really have. I asked the questions, "is it possible to be fully alive to the now? Is it possible to be fully present to His presence?"

I have struggled much with distraction in the "here and now" by the "there and then",the
past and the future. Last week I wrote about the "then", i.e. the past; now this week I want to speak about the "there", i.e. the future. The future is always ahead of us. It is as unknowable and uncontrollable as the past is unchangeable. There really is not a future except as a whole range of possibilities, none of which is sure to happen. No matter how much preparedness, no matter how much we plan, the future is full of surprises and disappointments. I cannot even begin to describe how different my life has turned out than what I planned. Who knew that my wife would leave me and that we would not grow old and spend out the rest of our days together? Who knew that I would no longer be pastoring my beloved Lighthouse Christian Fellowship? Who knew that I would almost die of Staph? Who would know that I would meet another girl, fall in love, and move to West Maui? Who knew? I sure did not!

I had so many plans, hopes, and dreams about my life. I never imagined what my life would become. Yet here I am. For all I thought my life would be, I have been consistently wrong! I am asking myself the question as I write-why, why do I try so hard to control the future when in fact I have absolutely no control over the future? Why do we try to impose a will on a non existent thing? We can try to prepare for the future, that is both wise and good stewardship, but we cannot control it.

Yet, we all feebly and unconsciously try to control our future. Let me show you how. First, by worrying about it. I worry about some negative outcome and then by worrying I think somehow my worry will keep what I worry about from really happening. I tend to worry allot, which is a sign of my powerlessness and helplessness. Every time I read Philippians 4:6-7 I get so convicted. "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. ⁷ And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus".

I so desire to live this way. I ask myself, "what was Paul's secret?" He believed that He who he held onto in the present moment held the future. He was at ease about what he could not control because he trusted in the one who was in control. Augustine believed that the past and future did not really exist except as forces that influenced the present, the past being as memory and the future as expectation. in the present we allow the past to influence our memory, in the present we allow the future to influence our expectation, but the present of our present influences our attention.

This moment, this here and now, is truly all that we have. Because of that, we should be supremely attentive to this present moment. God wants us to be free in this present moment because He sovereignly uses our past and will use our future to work out His plans for us. This makes my regret concerning the past and worries about the future unnecessary.

Such attentiveness has to do with the ongoing moments of my daily life, work, family, leisure, relationships, and church, especially the things that we easily overlook because they seem so insignificant and trivial. How often am I here but really not here because at those moments I am there and then. The fact is that God is present in every most trivial moment and cares about each and every moment. Every moment has meaning and purpose if God is in it. Living in the here and now makes us open to God and what He wants to do with it and in us-especially in those seemingly dull and uneventful moments.

To find God in the smallest and most ordinary things is to posses a rare and sublime faith. To find contentment in the here and now is to cherish and adore the will of God. John piper calls it, submitting to the place where God has us and adopting to the pace by which He is moving.

C.S. Lewis was so alive and aware of life full of meaning and purpose all around him in the "here and now". John Piper writes:

Lewis’s keen penetrating sense of his own heart’s aching for Joy, combined with his utter amazement at the sheer, objective realness of things other than himself, has over and over awakened me from the slumbers of self-absorption to see and savor the world and through the world, the Maker of the world. And this sense of wonder at what is—really is—has carried over into doctrine, and the gospel in particular...Lewis gave me, and continues to give me, an intense sense of the astonishing “realness? of things. He had the ability to see and feel what most of us see and do not see. He had what Alan Jacobs called “omnivorous attentiveness.”

Don't you just love that phrase "omnivorous attentiveness"? What this can do for you is amazing. What would my life be like if I wake up in the morning and to be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sight of my beautiful wife next to me, the sound of the birds singing, the coldness of the wooden floor, the wetness of the water in the sink, the sheer being of things (quiddity as C.S. Lewis called it). What if I was not just to be aware but full of wonder and amazement that water is wet; that the sky is blue, that the trees in my back yard are green, that the sound of the birds is melodic. None of this had to be. If there were no such thing as any of those and one day some one showed them to you, you would simply be astonished.

Oh how we need to become alive to life! To look at the sunrise and with say with an amazed smile, “God did it again!” I want to see what is there in the world—things which if we did not have them, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. I want to be convicted of my callous inattention and inability to enjoy God’s daily gifts. I want God to awaken my dazed soul so that the realities of life and of God and heaven and hell are seen and felt. I want to God to effect my eyes in such a way that life and this extraordinary world is a precious gift.

Living attentively in the here and now awakens us to seeing people with new eyes. Sometimes, we get so "familiar" with those we know or are close to, that we stop "seeing" them and having gratitude for them. Often times this awakening happens after someone who we knew has died. But I want to be alive now to people and especially my family, friends, and fellow Christan's. I want to rise above my petty complaints and see people—at least from time to time—as the staggering wonders that they are in the image of God.

Listen to what C.S. Lewis says about seeing people that has helped me so much:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."

We have no power to return to the past nor to reverse it, no power to control or predict our future. We only have the here and the now. I am confident that god is in the "here and now" working His beautiful plans. We are free to concentrate on what is at hand NOW: Work, nature, family, friends, whatever is in front of us right now, and most of all His presence in this NOW.  "Blessed are the people who know the joyful sound! They walk, O Lord, in the light of Your PRESENCE" (Psalm 89:15)

May you be My prayer for you and me is that God will give us fresh, new eyes to see him, others, and His world with childlike awe and wonder for what is right in front of our eyes. May we live in the "here and now", living each moment fully and passionately and attentively, choosing to know, love, and obey God each and every present moment of each and every day. May we be free from the tyranny of the "there and then" and become alive to the "here and now".

Pastor Bill