I have noticed that God has an interesting method to his teaching. A method to his madness if you will. All of my life I’ve been living in the future. Ask anyone who knows me and they can tell you that I’m always on to the next thing. “What’s next?” is most likely my most common phrase. Wether that be finishing dinner to move on to whats next or “When do I graduate so I can do what comes next in my life?”
But living in the future distracts me from seeing what God is doing now. I miss so much of what God has for me because I’m focusing too much on what comes next and not “What do you have for me now?” Or “What can I do for you now?”
This month God has been teaching me how to focus on the now and only the now. Digging a hole this month was such a symbols of how I need to train my focus on the present. Practically every day we would have to work backwards before we could make any forward progress. The hole would have to be emptied of water everyday before we could dig. And every time we emptied it the rain would come and fill it up. If I had allowed myself to mourn the fact that we had to redo everything we had already done or think about where we would have been if we didn’t have to empty it every time, I would have been disappointed and frustrated beyond belief. But each day God told me to focus on the task at hand. Nothing else. The day before or the day after didn’t exist. Whether we emptied the hole the day before didn’t matter. Neither did the fact that we could be so much father ahead if it hadn’t rained. The only thing that mattered was what was right in front of me. Getting the water out. Just that. Amazingly I never got frustrated or overwhelmed because there was no “next” there was only NOW.
God is a good teacher, we just have to have patience and receive his guidance with grace.
