Day 21: accepting your today

 

Lately I have been asking myself the question;

What is God doing in my today?

I am a dreamer who spends a lot of time in the future, but more and more I have been changing my focus from tomorrow, to today.

A strategy I have relied upon to help me with my stress in the moment, is by planning and preparing for my tomorrow.

I didn’t realise until a few short years ago that spending all my time trying to control the outcome of tomorrow, was a form of escapism that I used in my everyday.

I feel pain right now, so what can I do to control my tomorrow so this never happens again.

I feel like I have dissapointed someone and let them down, how can I change this so it never happens again.

I feel overwhelmed with the out of controlledness of this situation, so how can I plan safety so this never happens again.

Have you ever felt like this?

Have you lived in the perpetual cycle of keeping yourself safe, that you miss what is actually happening in your today?

As we have walked and talked, listened and learned from people who are less than nine months short of two major earthquakes, where they lost thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of homes, I am shocked by the immediateness of the need and the tenacity of a people living in the fear of what could happen tomorrow.

They are focussing on their today.

Last night we went to a resteraunt, where we were told the story that in the immediate hours following the earthquakes, they cooked, hundreds and hundreds of meals and made sure their neighbours were fed.

Today as we drove home from church, we watched a line of three hundred or more, cars and motor bikes lining up for fuel that costs more than six dollars a litre, for hour upon hour. What absolutely shocked me was the locals who were picking us up and driving us to places, wasting their precious resource on us.

We sat in a beautiful humble church this morning, with four passionately breathtaking women who sung their hearts out, under a open sky, with the roof of their building unfinished and half built after the earthquake, that they sat singing outside through the raining night in the hours after the disaster that took their homes.

Every single one of them are basking in their today. They are making a difference with the little they have, helping another despite their circumstance.

“The question asked is not, ‘What should be happening in my life?’ but ‘What is happening in my life?’ The present moment, the present set of circumstances, the present relationships in our lives—this is where God lives. This is where God meets us and gives us life.” ALICE FRYLING

I love these questions from Alice Fryling, instead of focusing on our circumstances and all the problems we have in our today, why not shift our perspective and by accepting our today?

I believe God is always up to something, it is us that needs to refocus on the present.

Day 21: I am fasting my need to know everything about my tomorrow and to start accepting my today.