The past few days, I have kept running into the idea of living one day at a time. It's come up enough in different things I've read, that I take notice. I'm still one of those "pre-moderns" who thinks that there's an unseen reality, that God speaks to us if we listen.
So when the same idea keeps showing up, I feel like I should take notice.
One story that stood out to me was about a woman who, in the course of a very short span of time lost one of her twin babies at birth, found out that the other would have permanent hearing loss, lost her father in a car accident that also permanently injured her mother. The car accident resulted in her having to oversee the selling of her father's business, and help her mom through a criminal investigation against the drunk driver who hit her parents. All while dealing with the loss of one baby, the loss of her father, and navigating life with a new baby who could not hear her mother's voice.
Merely one of these things would have been enough to send anyone into despair. The crushing weight of all of these tragedies in the span of even an entire year would be insurmountable, at least for me.
What am I going to do? What about tomorrow? Where do we go from here? How do I move ahead? What will the next week or year hold for us?
How did this woman respond? She focused on the ONE day she was in, even down to the hour. And she relied heavily on God, turning to Scripture, and praying for God to give her the grace and what was necessary for that one day. She didn't trouble herself with tomorrow or next week.
Not all of us have such tragedies befall us. Not yet.
We will. Let's not be foolish.
Throughout Scripture, God's way of responding when life's tragedies show up has always been that God would provide what is needed for the day, for the moment. No more. No less.
This need not apply only when tragedy hits. Tragedy only forces the issue. The reality is that this is how God operates with us and wants us to operate in life everyday.
But in the meantime, there is life to live. Sometimes out of necessity, we have to plan for the next week, month, or year. This is fine and necessary sometimes.
But a word of caution is in order: don't spend too much of your life on what may never come. Anticipate the coming days, weeks, or years. But don't carry the weight of the days yet unknown. And certainly don't expect them and live today looking to tomorrow. God gives you what's necessary for today. Don't spend it on the yet unlived tomorrow.
In the Lord's prayer, we often pray: "Give us today our daily bread." Not, "give us what we need for the next week."
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches, "Don't worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow has enough trouble of its own."
In the desert, God gave the people of Israel only enough bread and water for each day. Whatever else they hoarded went bad by the next day.
We want a plan. We're trained by our culture to look ahead. It's not that God wants us to just live by the seat of our pants, one day to the next. It's that God wants us to live with wisdom.
The wisdom of living is that what's ahead may never come. We may not make it. Or what we planned for or envisioned in the fuzzy future might not arrive as we'd anticipated. We are wiser and the living is better when we depend on God to give us what is needed for the present hour and day, and not try to bear the weight of trying to handle the burdens of all the things in the future that we may never see.
When we try to take on all of the things of tomorrow, we struggle. An AA group member once expressed that if he ever found himself thinking about being sober for the next year, or five years, he'd almost certainly relapse. This is after he'd been sober for a decade. He said, "It's when I focus on only the day ahead of me that I make it through to the next day."
It's often the same for me. When I'm overwhelmed with tomorrow or the next week, I relapse into something I don't want to be. But, when I'm not wasting my time and energy sweating over tomorrow, and when I have done my good work today, I am more prepared for my tomorrow, and more content with today.
God wants us to embrace the present. Not try to take on all that tomorrow might bring, too. More than this, God wants us to depend on God, not ourselves, and receive and enjoy the good things God gives us each day at a time. No more. And nothing less.
This is when the best living happens.
Always seeking life,
Pastor Kyle
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