Missing the Present: The "where" begins to answers the "Why"

Last time we ended on the below comments from Screwtape and Jesus:

“To be sure, the Enemy [God] wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present…He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do.” Pages 67-69.

And there is the crux of the whole matter as it always is: “where your treasure is there your heart will be also” (from Jesus of Nazareth).

So here again we come to the heart of the matter. Where is our heart?

I think we could really spend more time on living in the Present. Over a year ago I came to this realization: "I realized that for most of my life up until this day much of me has missed the present. There are huge pieces of myself that are consistently missing the moment. Missing the now. My body can be present but so often my mind is somewhere else. Why? Well Where is my mind so often? Busy trying to figure out how I’m going to accomplish the next objective, the next task, the next phone call, the next meeting because there is this fear in me that if a certain amount of stuff doesn’t get accomplished then I’ve failed for the day."

I was sad but a spark of hope was given to me. I felt Jesus begin to communicate with me that

"It doesn't have to be this way."

I would like to take you through the journey I've been on the next couple of blogs or so. Last July 2008 I shared the journey I've been on when it comes to living in the Present with a group of people. Again I think this is one of the most crucial things I've been learning thus far. Because

if we are not living in the PRESENT we are not living, we're

missing.

We are missing life. We are missing our purpose. We are missing God's invitations. We are missing the joys He puts before us. We are missing the people. We are missing...HIM...when we live focus on the future, a future that anxiety rules. To get what I'm saying and NOT saying chew on some of the things below if you have a chance.

"I work for the Vineyard Child Care now. About 10 or 11 days ago I had a break. I walked from Lakewaterford’s playground into the Childcare van to be alone. I was sitting in this van with AC blasting on a hot June Day, and I began to think about how God is a verb. This book “The Shack” I just finished reading reminded me of Exodus 3. Moses asks God His name so Moses can go tell the Israelites what God sent him. God responds with a word we pronounce as Yahweh. The word means in essence “To Be” it is a verb. God is saying I was who I was, I am who I am, and I will be who I will be. And I am not like any other god people have created. I am totally other. I am. To Be. God is Being. He is ALIVE.

God

is

a

verb.

So I sat in the van and all of a sudden I became aware. I realized that for most of my life up until this day much of me has missed the present. There are huge pieces of myself that are consistently missing the moment. Missing the now. My body can be present but so often my mind is somewhere else. Where? Busy trying to figure out how I’m going to accomplish the next objective, the next task, the next phone call, the next meeting because there is this fear in me that if a certain amount of stuff doesn’t get accomplished then I’ve failed for the day.

So people are often getting just a piece of me when they converse with me because I’m thinking about the near future, the next task. I’m thinking about some ministry thing, or the book I have to finish reading, or if so and so likes me, or if I don’t get the grass cut today then it’ll never get done and on and on. The task could be a chore or a person! And if an interruption happens during my planned schedule I get irritable. And even when I get to the next task and finish it there is another task waiting.

As I was sitting in the van I felt alarmed. I felt like I was missing out on the present, the now, the moment as I continually seek and worry about the near future’s tasks. I’m missing out. And there was this cry in my heart “God, just as You are fully present, I want to be fully present in life.” I want to be fully present when someone is talking to me. I want to be fully present as I’m at work. I want to be fully present at celebrations. I want to be fully present in the city and in the suburbs. I want to be fully present, my body, mind and heart. I want to BE. I want to BE. I want to see what God is doing in the moment, especially in the so-called ordinary things of life, in the so called mundane. “Lord, I want to be.” If I’m missing much of the now then I’m missing life. I don’t want to anymore."

We will pick up from there next time.

PRESENT PRESENT PRESENT!!! Live there

Last week’s entry dealing with the truth about ownership, our schedules, and the illusion of "MY time" made me want to stick on this whole issue of living in the present moment. What does that mean? I've been on a journey the last 10 months trying to figure that out and slowly but surely things are changing. I've come to this realization that this is one of the most important things we must grasp in life in order for true life giving transformation to take place.

If we are not living in the Present we are MISSING life. I am sick of missing out on life, aren't you?

The demon Screwtape focuses in on their strategy to get us to focus on the Future. He continues his series of letters to his nephew Wormwood (oh and if you only have about 5 minutes skip down to the green quote, it is a juicy nugget):

“The humans live in time, but our Enemy [God] destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole, in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.” (I added underlines).

Present, Present, Present!!! This is where we are called to live but we are so often being ruled by anxiety which focuses us on the very near Future. Worry leads us: “What will I eat for lunch? What will I wear tomorrow? If I don’t get this paper done now I’ll never get it done. I’ll fail. Then I’ll have to quit school. Then I won’t get a good job. Then I’ll have to live with my parents forever. Then eventually I’ll be homeless!”

Screwtape goes on to say how demons strategy is to get us to focus more on the Future and the Past then on the Present.

“Our [the demons] business is to get them [humans] away from the eternal and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the Past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the Future. Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice [Greed], lust, and ambition look ahead.”

Last week a good friend of mine reminded me of a quote from a book by Phil Strout called God’s Relentless Pursuit. It is this following quote and the conversation I had with my friend that made me want to continue to chew on this whole issue of living in the present:

“Gerald Sittser, the author of The Will of God as a Way of Life, explains his discovery of God’s will:

As I struggled with the issue of discovering God’s will in light of my own personal uncertainty, intense suffering, and in-depth biblical study, I came to a startling conclusion. The will of God concerns the present more than the future. It deals with our motives as well as our actions. It focuses on the little decisions we make every day even more than the big decisions we make about the future. The only time we really have to know and do God’s will is the present moment. We are to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Sometimes, we can make God’s will so difficult to grasp that we forget that there are simple commands God gives, us, enabling us to do His will each day. God is not trying to trick us—He wants us to get it.” (Page 139).

I think Phil’s commentary explains Sittser’s thought best. But what about planning for the Future? Isn’t there some wisdom in that? Screwtape continues:

“To be sure, the Enemy [God] wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present…He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do.” Pages 67-69.

And there is the crux of the whole matter as it always is: “where your treasure is there your heart will be also” (from Jesus of Nazareth). We’ll pick up on that next time.

MY life, MY Time MY Education...(PART 2 read April 6th blog first)

The demon Screwtape continues on Page 97

“The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell, and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another! It is as if a royal child whom his father has placed, for love’s sake, in titular command of some great province, >>page 98 under the real rule of wise counselors, should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forests, and the corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor.

“We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun—the finely graded differences that run from ‘my boots’ through ‘my dog,’ ‘my servant,’ ‘my wife,’ ‘my father,’ ‘my master,’ and ‘my country,’ to ‘my God.’ They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of ‘my boots,’ the ‘my’ of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by ‘my Teddy bear, ‘ not the old imagine recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relations (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful), but ‘the bear I can pull to pieces if I like.’ And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say ‘my God’ in a sense not really very different from ‘my boots,’ meaning ‘the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit—the God I have done a corner in.’

And all the time the joke is that the word ‘mine’ in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our father [the Devil] or the Enemy [God] will say ‘mine’ of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong—certainly not to them, whatever happens. At present the Enemy [God] says ‘mine’ of everything on the >>page 99 pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it. Our Father hopes in the end to say ‘mine’ of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest.

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE”

These thoughts helped me see my own shortcomings and the enemy’s schemes. At first as I read this I thought that God was just using this reading to ‘polish’ what He did in me last Spring in regards to my unhealthy cultural American value of being time and objective-oriented rather than relationship-oriented. Meaning, I’m always looking at the clock, always managing, frustrated at any kind of tardiness or me not being very early to meetings. I was so time-oriented that I would often miss the

PERSON

and what was going on with them and what God was doing with them right there. I was thinking about how much time I had left to study, or if I would have time to be able to write, or that it was time for me to eat, or I needed to have time to get to a meeting or time to plan for one. I realized how bad it was last year as God began to show me how I saw people as objectives on a to-do-list rather than PEOPLE who God loves just because, and that putting them on a mental to-do-list was NOT

respecting,and loving them

And

it

was

sin.

So I give all that background because I really went through a huge paradigm shift last year and thought that God, through this C.S. Lewis reading, was just re-affirming and polishing that change in me. But then I realized that He was actually showing me and encouraging the deeper work He currently is doing in me in regards to ‘my’ time with how much I study for school. The last two months have been extremely hard as I try to be obedient to His voice in regards to what I do with the time (‘my’ time I often say, now through this reading I’m realizing it isn’t MY time) I’ve been given. “How much should I study? I’ve got a test, and research papers, I better study for 5-8 hours on Saturday.” I’ll make plans like this a week in advance like I used to do but over the last two months God has been challenging me and ‘my’ plans and ‘my time management’. It is scary. It is risky. What if I do bad in school because I didn’t study enough? Oh all the fears arise. As someone who has been a straight A student in college (just one B first semester, which I hated) the thought of getting lower than Bs—even that used to disgust me—is scary.

This reading gave me a much needed perspective shift that I thought was already in place, but even as I’m writing when I say ‘my time’ I realize it is a perspective shift still much needed in me. It is not MY time. It is HIS time. So the question I’ve been asking myself is “Lord what do You want me to do with my time?” The question has had an honest motive and I think the Lord is pleased but I think He is helping me through this reading see that the question can change slightly but make a major difference in the way I see life, time management, and school:

“Father, what do You want to do with me with our time?”

I think Our is the right pronoun. At first I wanted to put down ‘Your’ time but recently my request to God has been to be united to Him and know Him relationally as a spouse and there is this union and partnership that happens with that. At the same time I know that the Scriptures have these theme guiding words, “Not my will but Yours be done,” and “Your Kingdom come Your will be done.” I WANT THAT. And I think that is what I’ve been asking for even when I said, “Lord what do You want to do with MY time?” and I think it is true when I say, “What do You want to do with OUR time?” I’ll have to chew on that.

MY life, MY time...Is this Reality?

Now as to the rest of the letters that have impacted me today [this was in March] I was going to go through them systematically in numerical order, but I can see that the Lord has different plans. I was over Dustin’s house and he mentioned how much we value our schedules and time in America. How we protect it. That comment I told him immediately reminded me of what I read in the Screwtape letters.

It is the 21^st letter starting on page 95: “Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, >>page 96 therefore that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quit evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tete-a-tete with the friend), that throws him out of gear.”

Wow that quote couldn’t have said it better. This is so true of myself. Screwtape goes on

“They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’ Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.”

Screwtape goes on to say that Wormwood shouldn’t try to keep this lie intact through a logical argument because there is no argument for it. It is nonsense. Humans don’t really ‘own’ anything. If God were to come down now in bodily form to the Christian and ask for all that man’s time for the day he would obediently comply, in theory he says. So the simple jargon “my time is my own,” will suffice and it, according to Screwtape, is better left covered completely in darkness never brought the front of the person’s mind, because it is ridiculous. If the man ever questions it the assumption “my time is my own’ will be exposed as it really is…ABSURD, says Screwtape. “The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels [an item of personal property]”

As I was reading I was convicted at how much I say "God what do you want me to do with my time?" I chuckled as I told Dustin about this. More to come...