Presently Future Past
The future. What does that mean to you? Just that phrase, those two simple words, pack a powerful brain punch. The future is always ahead of us. It’s not where we are now. Or is it? And I don’t mean in a right now is the future to the past and the past to the future sort of way. I’ll get to that in a minute. Wait, no, I better get to it now.
Think about it. When you were growing up, what did you think was in the future? Shiny things, maybe? Flying cars? Instant communication with the whole world? Teleportation? Time travel? Well, we don’t have time travel or teleportation, but we do have incredible technology. Remarkable, really. We aren’t all wearing aluminum foil-like jumpsuits with matching helmets that hold little computer screens in front of our eyes, but our world is much shiner than say, 150 years ago. Think of how shiny the world was from the beginning until just the 20th century. Not very. And it was stinky too. Now you see shiny cars, cell phones, TV’s, everything. And what about communication? If you know the number, email address, or username, you can literally talk face to face (over the internet) to anyone, virtually (no pun intended) anywhere on the planet.
Until the last just over 100 years, people spent months on stanky boats, with rampant diseases, starving to come from Europe or Asia or anywhere else to come to the “New World”. MONTHS. Now we hop on an airplane and take mere hours to get to any location on the planet. And we still complain about it.
That’s just one definition of the future. What about the more stress-filled definition of the future? Your personal future. Most of us spend almost every waking minute of our lives worrying or working towards our future. What will I do in the future? Where will I live? What will I drive? Who will I be spending the rest of my life with? How am I going to pay for ______? But do we ever make it to the future? In a literal sense, no. Today is our present, yesterday is our past, and tomorrow is this unattainable future. A concept, but never an experienced reality.
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If we can never really obtain this future. If it’s always out of our grasp…what are we doing? Why are we still chasing this? Why are we worrying about it? And for that matter, why do we dwell on the past?
Today is the only day you may ever get.
Yet, here we are. We are here. We’re not there anymore. And we’re never really going to get there. To the future, that is. Because the future is always just one night’s sleep away. But when we wake up, we are just here again. The present. The past is gone, and the future is ahead once more.
We can’t get there. But there is a God who knows your future. The future you won’t know until it’s your present. He already sees it. And this is what he has to say about it:
…do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?[g] 28 And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
34 “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Matthew 6:25–34
