You will lose your way the minute you decide to go your own way. When you seek God’s will alone, you find it everywhere, and you cannot go astray. Wanting what God wants always puts you on a straight path.The future is not yet yours; it may never be. Live in the present moment. Tomorrow’s grace is not given to you today. The present moment is the only place where you can touch the eternal realm…. Let God work, and think only of dying to the present moment without reservation, as though it were the whole of eternity.
~François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
When Jesus had spoken these words, He lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son that the Son may glorify You, since You have given Him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom You have sent. I glorified You on earth, having accomplished the work that You gave Me to do. And now, Father, glorify Me in your Own presence with the glory that I had with You before the world existed.
~ Jesus, King of The Universe, in John 17
Oh beloved, it is true.
We live in four dimensions. We can see Up and Down. Back and Forth. Left and Right. And all of this happens along another dimension we know as Time. What is not so clear to us though, is that at the ends of these dimensions – and at the place where they all come together – there is another thing altogether.
Eternity.
Most of us have been conditioned to think of eternity as something that will happen in the future. This is true. But, as many facts are true, they are not the whole truth. And this is where we can get ourselves into a problem (or a host of them) if we miss the reality of our relationship with G_d.
It is very easy to miss, too. We often get so busy that we scramble over it. It seems so small. Nearly infinitesimal.
Exactly.
Nearly everything that we do, that goes wrong, or that we do wrong, is because we miss it. We fall into sin and selfishness because we get impatient. We get bitter and angry because we are dwelling on things that happened in our past.
Can we see it?
All of this has to stop, and we can’t wait for some eternal future to get started. So, what are we to do? The answer is both, so simple that we nearly miss it, and so complex that we find it nearly impossible to implement.
We have to live right now. We need to stop looking being this exact, present moment.
But, once we do, something happens. We find that the infinitesimal, is just what it is called. It is a boundless space. Within the boundless, is the eternity that we were expecting someday. Except now, it is not sometime in the future. It is now.
And now is
where impatience has no meaning
where the past is not relevant
where worry has no time to bother us
where He is. And in His Presence, is the fullness of joy.
So, are you trying to stop some sort of bad behavior? Are you trying to quit worrying about the past, or something that may happen in the future? There is only one place this can happen.
Now.
Tonight is your night, beloved. Time to believe the truth of the eternal now.
Begin at once; before you venture away from this quiet moment, ask your King to take you wholly into His service, and place all the hours of this day quite simply at His disposal, and ask Him to make and keep you ready to do just exactly what He appoints. Never mind about tomorrow; one day at a time is enough. Try it today, and see if it is not a day of strange, almost curious peace, so sweet that you will be only too thankful, when tomorrow comes, to ask Him to take it also—till it will become a blessed habit to hold yourself simply and “wholly at Thy commandment for any service.” The “whatsoever” is not necessarily active work. It may be waiting (whether half an hour or half a lifetime), learning, suffering, sitting still. But shall we be less ready for these, if any of them are His appointments for today? Let us ask Him to prepare us for all that He is preparing for us.
~Frances Ridley Havergal
