As a child, I would often bubble over with anticipation regarding some big event that was approaching — a family vacation, my birthday, even a moving of houses — and there was no bigger occasion in all the kid calendar than Christmas morning. Most years, I wouldn’t be able to sleep the entire night through as my brain worked overtime imagining all the sweet loot I hope to receive. The night was interminable, and despite my fatigue I cursed its slow progression, fearing the sun might never rise.
Years later, Christmas doesn’t excite me in the same way, but there are events in life that grab a hold of your heart and make you wish you had a time machine. My wedding, for example, couldn’t come soon enough. I dreamt of that special day practically from the day I slipped the engagement ring on my now-wife’s finger. Other periods of intense change that occur periodically throughout our lives can leave us flustered, excited, and even a bit nervous as we wonder if the longed-for event will ever come.
It has been said that some Christians are so heavenly-minded that they are no earthly good. If believers truly understood heaven, that would never be the case, but that aside, this cliche does point to the more general truism that in life we can often be so focused on the future that our present suffers. (Many others can become mired in the past and can’t even look toward the future, but that is a topic for another time). At one point or another during these seasons of intense change, I will come to my senses and realize that, taken to an extreme, this fixation on the future in unhealthy and contrary to what God desires for our lives.
Certainly future-mindedness can be negative and even destructive, especially if it is based in greed (looking for the next newer or better job, house, etc.) or indulged in to such an extent that we totally check out and fail to complete even simple tasks in the present. But more often than not, this view toward the future has much subtler consequences: we can become frustrated with our current situation, making us curt with, or distant from, those with whom we are interacting; we can lose the vigour with which we are normally wont to encounter our tasks; we can spend inordinate amounts of time dreaming about and planning for the future, when that time might have been spent elsewhere or on truly urgent present tasks.
This is not to say that there is no room for anticipation — God wants to live excitedly; there is no room for stoicism or a cold-fish mentality within the richness of life that Jesus wants us to experience — but I think we would all agree that there is the danger of missing what God has for us in the present if we keep fixing our attention on the future to the exclusion of the present. Indeed, sometimes it is hard enough to discern God’s voice and hand in the present even when we don’t have some specific situation to which we can look forward. What about that person that God wants us to talk to, who needs to hear of his love for them or simply needs encouragement? We may miss that. What about the opportunity to witness God’s answers to the prayers that you have been praying. You won’t see these if you are too focused on the future. The list could go on.
What can we do in the face of a large and exciting change in order to adopt a present-centered mentality? We can own a mantra that can bring us back to where we need to be: as John Lennon has said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re out making other plans.” This reminds me that we are simply passing life by and not truly living it if we are only focused on the future, because the future will always remain in the future and we can only exist in the present. And, as always, we can ensconce ourselves in God, the Eternal Present. We can trust both the present and the future to him, allowing him to direct our path both new and then.
