When our son, Greg, was around four-years-old he began asking questions that were at once amusing and frustrating to us. We could be at
I even wrote a little song that I would sing to him:
Don’t spend all your hopes on tomorrow, my son.
Tomorrow’s a prize that is yet to be won,
But this day you hold in your hand--
Its wonders are at your command.
Be still and alert, my son; watch the grass grow,
Smell warm summer mornings, and feel winter’s snow.
Impatience will soon make you blind
To treasures you’d otherwise find.
So offer fresh popcorn to birds in the park.
Love daylight as well as its fading to dark.
Take each chance that happens your way
to taste of the joy in today.
Working through this tendency to always look ahead with Greg did little to increase my own awareness that it was a characteristic he had probably inherited from me. The first time I was keenly aware of my own difficulty with living one day at a time was in 1982 when Ron was diagnosed with cancer. We had four children ages 11 to 18 years old, and I battled daily the fears of what I would do if I had to raise them alone. I indulged in horrifying scenes of what lay ahead in the months I might have to watch Ron suffer through chemotherapy and/or death. I worried about our children being without a father. I worried about finances, home maintenance, loneliness, my identity without Ron and dozens of other unpleasant possibilities. I found myself unable to be what Ron and my children needed me to be: squarely in the present. I was too consumed with the uncertainties of the future.
I realized that when things were going well, I made plans for tomorrow as if tomorrow were guaranteed. I love feeling that my future is predictable. This fallacy can make me quite independent from God. Hard times drive me to my knees begging God to fix what I cannot, yet I still try to picture the future and come up with solutions for alternate circumstances. Ron’s cancer revealed my powerlessness.
I didn’t know what sorrow or hardship might lie ahead, but I knew it wouldn’t be forever. Ron would either get well or he would die, and in the meantime, there was a faith and hope and joy that God was calling me to. Either way, I had a limited time to rise to the occasion. Changing my outlook to other-centered compassion instead of self-centered fears was the only way I could contribute positively to a negative situation. I knew that after the crisis, no matter the outcome, I would have fewer regrets if I became what Ron and our kids needed me to be.
I knew Jesus’ admonishment: Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:34) I tried to “repent” of this sin of worry, but it haunted my subconscious even in my sleep. I felt like an unwilling victim of my own dark imagination. When faced by overwhelming circumstances, repentance is not so much the issue here as “being transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)
We are created by God with some limitations common to human nature. We are not designed to take on much more than our current circumstances. God alone can deal practically and emotionally with unlimited problems. Since we are not prescient, we overwhelm ourselves emotionally and stunt our growth spiritually when we borrow tomorrow’s multitude of ill-conceived eventualities. It is truly more than we can bear.
Current vernacular encourages us to “live in the present” as if it’s a wisdom newly articulated by an enlightened generation. Amazing how we take ancient truths from God and repackage them to pretend they are our own! In James 4:13, we are cautioned: Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city…. Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and them vanishes.”
It was this scripture that informed my new mindset. I forced myself several times a day (as fears demanded my attention) to go through this little exercise: “What do I know today? Today I know Ron is alive. Today I know he and my children need me to be happy and hopeful. I know how to do those things for today. I don’t know about tomorrow, but I know that God knows and he will give me the strength, wisdom, and spiritual counselors to help me deal with tomorrow. I will focus on today.” It may sound corny, but this little exercise was my sanity during that period and became the drill I returned to during future trials.
Our situation had a happy ending: Ron was cured, and we raised our family together. It is still my nature to worry about tomorrow. I return to a righteous mindset by decision and with much effort, but it does have a transforming power. In my youth, I actually envisioned myself growing into a wise and serene spiritual maturity that would be little short of legendary. I thought wisdom and peace would exude from every wrinkled pore and gray hair. I have been disappointed to discover that peaceful sagacity did not come to me with age. The saying on the birthday card is true: “They say with age comes wisdom…sometimes age just comes alone.” The truth is that most of the things I didn’t like about myself at age 25 are still about the same. I just have a few more God-supplied tools in my bag to deal with them.
The world will always supply us with reasons to borrow tomorrow’s problems. Now that I’m finished raising my children I remain vulnerable to worry over them as well as their children: their health, their faith, their jobs and their general happiness. Plus, there is the economy, terrorism, our retirement fund, and the spiritual health of the churches. There is no end to the list if we are given to worry.
A couple of years ago, my doctors found a mass in my left lung about the size of a baseball. This produced an annoying persistent cough, compromised my breathing and made it hard for me to sleep comfortably through the night. One morning after this discovery, and while a biopsy had still not revealed a diagnosis, I groggily surfaced from slumber to find myself wheezing and breathing with some effort. In this half awake state, I went to the bad place in my mind. I moaned and wondered how agonizing it would be to lie for days on my deathbed, gasping for breath? I finally became fully awake enough to re-embrace my old one-day-at-a-time decision. I laughed thinking to myself: And if I do die a horrible, oxygen-deprived death, I’ll look back on this day and say, “I felt great that day! I can’t believe I wasted it dreading this one!” In the meantime, I have been diagnosed and moved into remission with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
I wish I were farther along in my faith and wisdom. I wish worry were now a distant memory of my immature past. The truth is, I am as prone to worry about insignificant things as about big things. I think it is sometimes easier for me to let go of the big things really knowing I cannot control them, yet fret about the little things over which I maintain an illusion of control. Apparently, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I believe that if I spend enough time agonizing over a problem, I will eventually come up with a perfect solution. Silly me! Paul said, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” (Philippians 4:13) Somehow, buried deep within my psyche is the idea that I can do all things if I just brood about it long enough, but that is silly arrogance.
Taking one day at a time is the only sure way to deal with responsibilities that are ours while leaving the rest to God. It’s a great way to live. I think God tells us not to worry to protect us rather than to scold us. He’s trying to offer us both sanity and peace. I like the saying: “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.”
