Embracing the Present: The Beauty of Now

The miracle of time is the way that eternity intersects with this moment right here. If I'm gonna meet with God, it will have to be in this moment. So right now, let go of everything that you have to worry about what's coming up in the future or that shouldn't happen in the past, and be fully present right now. [00:01:58]

I had been expending all this effort to get to Big Sur and now I was just trying to get through Big Sur. I had wanted to get to it, and now it was just something to get through, and I thought how often do I approach my life that way. This is the moment right here that I want to get to, but I treat it as something to get through. [00:04:06]

Every moment is a moment to get to because every moment is a moment where God is. Every moment is or can be the shank of the day, kinda sorta. Old Uncle Screwtape is writing about how it is the plan of the evil one, the plan of hell, to draw us away from this moment because this moment is where we meet God. [00:04:50]

He does not want men to give the future their hearts to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity, if that is their vocation, washes their mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to heaven, God's in charge of outcomes, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over them. [00:05:22]

We want a person hag ridden by the future, haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth, ready to break the enemy's commands in the present if by doing so we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other, dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. [00:05:56]

One of the most common commands in the Bible is to remember because the past is a key part of us. One of the most common commands in the Bible is to hope because the future lies before us. There's a philosopher, Socolowsky, who writes about how our time, when you think about our experience, our consciousness, our awareness of time, in fact always includes a tiny little bit of the past and a tiny little bit of the future. [00:06:49]

We sometimes think that consciousness must be kind of like a movie where you just have one cell and then another cell and then another cell and they just go by so fast that they blend together, but he says that's not true because part of what we have is a sense of duration that we would not have if it was just a series of cells. [00:07:30]

We were designed by God to remember the past with gratitude, and so that remembering is a part of what we're called to do, and a part of living in this presence sometime is to remember the past, not to wish that I could erase it, not to regret it in that sense, to accept it, for I cannot change it. [00:08:04]

And so I embrace and accept the past and an old teacher Ian Pitt Watson and he said, when you remember something if you do it right, what was passed once before becomes present once again, and that's why in the Bible we're told over and over again to remember God and especially to remember Jesus to remember his sacrifice at the table. [00:08:28]

Human consciousness, Dallas Willard used to say, is arranged such that it demands a projected future. However old you are, however near death might be, our consciousness demands it and we cannot pretend it is not so. There's a whole genre of very clever philosophical cartoons that reflect on mortality using fruit flies. [00:09:03]

Right now let go of the burden of the past, stop resisting what happened and simply accept it as something that God can and will redeem. Remember, remember, and then reflect on the fact that you have a future, whatever your health is, whatever loss you're facing, you have a future forever with God. [00:10:22]

And therefore, today, right now, live now, live this miracle. This is the shank of the day. Have a really good one. [00:10:49]