For the first few months of the Race, I was all in. Every single moment was a moment in which I was completely present—and if I wasn’t present then I was busy figuring out how to be.
I wanted to experience every song, every dance, every sight and sound, every child’s laugh and every widow’s cry. I wanted to be completely present—I wanted to be completely here.
And then, as the months went on, being ‘here’ got a lot harder. As deadlines for medical school approached, I found my mind more and more in the classroom. And as the time got closer for my parents to get out to Rwanda to see me, my heart longed more and more for Alabama and the people I left behind there.
Then some things started falling into place for my future that really made being ‘here’ get a lot more difficult really quickly.
Suddenly, I found that getting myself to exist ’here’ was becoming a thing of the past.
Every conversation I found myself in was somehow about things that wouldn’t happen for months and maybe even years. I started dwelling on the future and letting my mind get lost in plans that couldn’t even almost be acted on yet.
My future was an exciting place to live in; the issue was that it was the only place I was living in.
Hear me out—there is absolutely nothing wrong with being excited for the future and all that it holds. In fact, as Christians, we should eagerly await the glory of the future that the Lord has planned out for us.
But, our joy for the future ‘there’ should never replace our contentment with the present ‘here.’
God has called us to live fully in the now. It is only if we are ‘here’ that we will be able to see what it is that the Spirit is trying to reveal to us in this moment. When we look into the future, we risk missing the glory that the Father is trying to show us right here, right now.
I truly believe that my future has never been a more beautiful and magical place at any other time in my life; and yet, it still doesn’t deserve the full attention that I should be pouring into my present. It can’t steal the gift of the ‘here.’
So the challenge I now find before me is figuring out exactly how to be here. How do I eagerly await my future while existing completely in the now that is right in front of me?
I don’t really have an answer yet. But I do think that I will begin with the simple things.
I’ll go back to listening out for the laughs of little children. I’ll start looking for the smiles on those old peoples’ faces. I’ll focus on giving my all into those early morning conversations over coffee instead of wondering when I’ll be able to get back to wifi.
Because at the end of the day all we have is the ‘here.’ And no matter how much excitement and magic you know the future will hold—nothing is more beautiful than the grace of the present moment that we’ve been given.
When I look back on my World Race—and back on my life in general—it will be the moments in which I was fully alive in the ‘here’ that stick out to me. I won’t look back on conversations in which we worried about the future; I’ll reminisce on those three-hour-too-long conversations that led us to a deeper knowledge of who each other was right there in that moment.
You see, I don’t quite have a 12-step program mapped out about how to be ‘here.’ But, I certainly do have the ability to slow down and take in the current moment I’ve been given.
So, I think I’ll start focusing on doing that more.
And I think I’ll start right here, right now.
