A Decisive Moment: God's Promise Required Fearless Action

As I write this, I am sitting on the beach in Hawaii finding it incredibly easy to be present as I listen to the waves roll in and feel the sunshine on my face. But that’s what vacation is for, isn’t it? To take a break and be present before jumping back into “real life”? But as I sit here thinking about it maybe we’ve got that all wrong.

I can remember when I was first starting out in ministry as a young 20 something. I was working at a church that worked hard to mentor and grow us as young ministry leaders. One way that they did that was to invite different speakers to come in and share about an area of ministry or their experience as a leader of industry or some such thing. One day we had a speaker who had come in to share about her leadership experience as part of a C suite executive at a large company in the Bay Area. There were about 20 of us gathered to listen when she told us that when we got “real” jobs and were out in the real world we would get it. I think she meant to encourage us toward growth, but the message received was clear: your current life is a dress rehearsal. We tend to live as if we are in the waiting room of our own lives, measuring our success only by what we might become. Oliver Burkeman in his book Meditations for Mortals puts it this way:

“… that this, here and now, is real life. This is it. This portion of your limited time, the part before you’ve managed to get on top of everything, or dealt with your procrastination problem, or graduated or found a partner or retired; and before the survival of democracy or the climate have been secured: this part matters just as much as any other and arguably even more than any other, since the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists.”

If we live our lives in anticipation of when “real life” begins we fill our present with anxiety and a lack of contentment. That is not to say that we shouldn’t make plans for our future or set goals we hope to accomplish, but we can’t live in the “not yet” all the time. We have to live in both worlds–the now and the not yet.

As a follower of Christ, I believe God meets me exactly where I am—not where I’ll be in five years or when I finally ‘get it.’ There is such joy in His current acceptance. If God can love me in my unfinished state while still dreaming of my future, then I can stop treating today like a prerequisite. I can live fully in this moment, fixing my eyes on the horizon with anticipation rather than anxiety.

It is easy to be present when the Pacific is at your feet. It is much harder when the inbox is full and the laundry is piling up. How can we find those “vacation moments” of presence in the ordinary, trusting that God is just as present in the mundane as He is in the magnificent?