Practicing the Present

Send us Fan MailI am a sucker for books and movies about time travel. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, the DeLorean in Back to the Future, and any Star Trek episode in which the crew of the starship Enterprise travels back to the twentieth century—I love them all. But over the years, I’ve learned a few important things about time travel. For example, as far as I can tell from these books and movies, backward is better than forward. When you travel back in time, you know what you’re getting. The future, on the other hand, is unknown and always seems to get worse. But that doesn’t mean that the past is safe. When you travel back in time, you had better not touch anything. Apparently, the smallest change can have devastating effects on the space-time continuum. You may come back to the present and find that you don’t exist. In real life, time travel is impossible, but that doesn’tmean I have no interest in the past or the future. The truth is, I’m oftenpreoccupied with both. Sometimes it’s because I’m thinking about the past,trying to understand what I have experienced and how it affects my life. Justas often I’m concerned about the future. Maybe it’s because I’m looking forwardto what comes next. More often it’s because I’m worried about it. What getslost in all of this is the present. Like the quiet child in a loud family, it’soften overlooked. Either way I tend to brush by the present, as if it weresome stranger I pass on a busy street. Or if I do give it attention, it’susually only a kind of grudging consideration—the sort you might give tosomeone who whines until your attention is wheedled away from the thing thatreally interests you . “I have been scattered in times I do not understand,” St. Augustine complained. He saw his life as one that stretched in many directions at once. Like Augustine, our minds too are scattered in time, so that our interests range far beyond the present. At one moment, we peer intently into the past, hoping for the mists to clear and longing to catch a glimpse of a present that has disappeared from view. In the next, we skip far ahead, hoping to scout out the future and stake a certain claim. Unfortunately, the beauty and value of the present is often lost. We are here in body but not in mind. We are only halfhearted in our attention and sometimes in our service. To someone whose interest is chiefly on the future, the present is only a way station. Its primary function is to serve as a staging ground for what comes next. For the person whose focus is mostly on the past, the present is a cemetery filled with monuments to the glory days that will never come again or with a painful record of the injuries and slights we have suffered. I want to propose an alternative. I call it the “practicing the present.” Practicing the present is more than the habit of slowing down and making ourselves aware of what is going on in the moment. It’s a way of locating ourselves in the world. It’s a way of seeing. Practicing the present is the habit of reining in our wandering mind and concentrating our attention on the here and now. This means, first of all, taking stock of things as they really are. What is the real landscape of my life? What do things really look like? We are doing more than assessing. We are trying to orient ourselves to reality. Those who dwell on the past and future are often living in a fantasy world. But God is at work in the real world. As we take stock of things as they really are, we do so with an awareness that God is truly present no matter how mundane or how bleak the circumstances appear. Those who practice the present believe that God dwells inthe midst of the muck and mire of daily life. Practicing the present doesn’tignore the future or the past. But it does view both with a measure ofsanctified skepticism. The future and the past can both be an unhealthy refugefor those who are disappointed with their present. Practicing the present also demands that we rein in,Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Praying the Word column for the Lifeway publication Mature Living and is the author of 16 books. His latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is available from Amazon.  You can learn more about John at https://www.johnkoessler.com.