Sitting securely on the top of my list of things I am horrible at is remaining in the present. Little did I realize that this is a tactic of the enemy until I was reading from C.S. Lewis’s Scretape Letters one night.
Mozambique was a great and difficult time for me. I loved the ministry, but something was stirring in me with agonizing anticipation. I know that God has more for me. I know I do not experience His presence, power or intimacy the way it has been made available to me by the cross of Christ. I found myself crying out to God in frustration, “Where are You?! You say this sort of life is available to me, but I do not experience it!! I need You to make Yourself real to me! I want the life you promised me!”
The evening my frustration climaxed I opened up Screwtape Letters to letter fifteen and read the words that revealed the deception I had been living in for so long.
Lewis explains that one of the goals of the enemy is to distract us from the present. God wants us to attend to either eternity (which fixes our eyes and minds on Him, the eternal God and our hope of glory) or the present which is the place where “time touches eternity” (Lewis, 75). It is only in the present that we can experience what God has for us.
As I was reflecting on this, I recalled my first visit to Victoria Falls in Zambia. I wrote a poem shortly after the experience and wrote a similar concept:
Only in the rush of sheer exhilaration where grace is law and lawlessness disappears
Like scattering darkness at dawn; neither being missed nor remembered
Here awareness lasts a moment and cannot be regained
By scent,
sound.
taste,
touch,
or sight
It is only in this place where the foot of heaven
Seems so thin
My heart inquires to its presence
We cannot regain the unadulterated goodness of a moment by recalling it. Think of the greatest moments of your life. Can you recover the exact feeling? I have found that recollection, though important, provides a sad carbon copy of the original. We cannot recall the goodness, intimacy, beauty or adventure of a moment. The only place we can experience real joy is right now.
John Elderage says in his book “The Sacred Romance” that the human heart longs for three main things: intimacy, beauty and adventure. I have seen this to be absolutely accurate in my own experience. We all must realize, though, that these things our hearts long for are only available to us now… whenever now may be.
Lewis contends that the future is the place the enemy wants us to dwell in the most. The future does not yet exist, so we sit in our imagination of it, projecting it and dwelling in its possibilities. We miss the possibilities of now because we are dwelling in the potential of the future. We miss our opportunity to swim in the deeper waters of intimacy with Christ in the pool of the mundane by jumping into our imagination of the future. We do not simply do this in the grand scale, months or years ahead, but also in the weekly, daily and minute-by-minute scale. Waiting for our next meal. Waiting for the bathroom. Waiting for the weekend. We seem to be always waiting and never opening our eyes enough to see what’s around us.
Only a few days before all this came together I wrote in my journal, “I keep looking for Jesus and I cannot seem to find Him anywhere.” This made perfect sense to me when I realized how much I had been living in the future or the past. Jesus cannot be found there, not really. His mark is left there, but He is only available to us in the now. We can only experience real joy, peace, grace, and freedom when we open ourselves enough to experience it presently.
Suddenly I would be picking up trash and see with new eyes a little flower and find my heart rejoicing in the beauty God has shown me. I began to look at waiting in line as an opportunity to commune with God, not a hassle to get through. I started to see the beauty of each moment, notice the adventure available in silly things like a water fight during dish washing, and recognize the way God is intimately involved in our every moments. The three things our hearts long for are only available to us now, and yet we search for them in every other feasible place.
I was sharing all of this with a teammate one day and expressed that I was afraid I would screw this up; that I would forget and not see Christ in the every mundane moment and miss out on intimacy with Him. As I was praying about this, the Lord explained to me, “Of course you will screw this up. This is one of the reasons you need me. You asked for ways to depend on me, and here is a practical way for every situation you may find yourself in for the rest of your life.” I had been asking God to make me depend on Him, thinking that would be physical, but God in His wisdom has given me a way to depend on Him that is always going to be something I must depend on Him for, no matter what my circumstances are. And I have found that intimacy hinges on dependence. If we do not depend on God, we cannot be intimate with Him. But as our dependence grows, so does our intimacy with Him.
Maybe you are like me and miss out on what God has for you in the mundane moments of everyday life by dwelling on the past or imagining the future. I want to encourage you to ask God to break you of this and show you how to see Him in the now. I hope you can see His presence in your driving to work, see the beauty He has for you in the smiles of strangers, and the adventure of washing dishes or getting groceries. It’s only available now.
