Unshackled Moments ~ July 30 ~ The Time Is Now

Anxiety and worry are hard to beat in part because they are the logical, reasonable response to being stuck in future mode in our mental time machine. We can always see multiple possibilities, the vast majority of which are as unlikely to happen as  winning the lottery, but hey, somebody's gonna win, right? Impulsively we begin to solve the problems, to come up with if a happens then b, but if ab happens then d, and if....But the longer we stay in the future, the more unlikely the possibilities become or the more we focus in on that one most likely possibility that hasn't been dismissed and moved on from because we don't have a plan. We have no way to make it work.

It is irresponsible to not look at tomorrow and prepare. The ant and the grasshopper and an instinctive admiration for the the Boy Scout motto to always be prepared have drilled it into us that we need to be ready for what may come. We need emergency supplies. We need a plan of action and fire drills. There is some truth in that. Jesus told us not to worry about tomorrow. He didn't say not to prepare. We can't fret and get twisted off obsessing about the things we can't prepare for, the things we don't have a plan or answer to deal with, we can't let the fear of the future we're stuck in mentally to pull us away from the present.

We need to get ready to do what we are responsible for and able to do. But then we need to put it in God's hands and let Him handle it. We also need to be careful about the trip back from the future. It is far too easy to overshoot the landing mark by a second or a decade. When we are not wasting the time we can't get back imagining a future, or many futures, that may or may not ever exist, we often spend the majority of that unreplenishable commodity resenting, rewriting and remembering the past. But it occurs to me that as true as the statements like live in the now, the only time that is real is the present, if you have one foot in the past and one in the future.....well, as true as those sayings and more like them are, there is something even deeper and more important going on than to make sure not to waste what little precious time that we've been given.

The 11th Step makes it clear that we are to pursue God. We don't just schedule time with our Creator and then go about our business. We don't catch aware of His presence when we can. We pursue Him by seeking to improve our conscious contact with Him. That means that to cease pursuing Him, to intentionally live away from His presence is to distance ourselves, to actively do the opposite of what we need to do. So we need to try to stay as consciously aware of Him or at least of pursuit of Him at every moment, I believe that is part of what we are told to do in Scripture when we are told to pray without ceasing. And God is not in the past or the future.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that He isn't eternal. I am not saying that He doesn't concern Himself with the future or the past. Jesus paid for our past and prepared for our future. But when Moses asked who God was, the Lord responded, "I AM." I AM is present. Yes, He is the one who was and is and is to come, but not so much those words alone as He was AM  (was present) and is AM (is present)  and is to come AM (will be eternally present in the future). God is the God of now. He is the Lord of the present. He can forgive, heal and restore our past. He can make a way and guide our future. But He can only minister the comfort and peace and joy of His presence to us in the present. We have to be with Him to have conscious contact with Him and have awareness of His presence.

Today let us live in the now so that we can be where He is when He is there. Let us put the mental time machine in park and stop flipping between the past and the present and instead focus on the moment that God gave us. When we feel the awareness of His presence in the now that is, it becomes easier to release the fear of the future to His hands and let go of our worries.  

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