This Present Moment

This Present Moment

While looking at this blog with the Lord, and reviewing our purpose and direction, I considered our topics. Every day we get to select a single topic to categorize our individual posts. Sometimes this has not been such an easy task. As a reminder, here is the list:

• Live the Moment – Releasing the past and future, and living in the now.
• Letting Go – Letting God be GOD.
• Living Loved – Letting God love you.
• Enjoying Him – Loving every facet of God where I find Him.
• Being Real – Facing truth.

This present moment

Each of these topics describes, for us, what it is to be a disciple. One of my favorites is “Live the Moment.” This aspect is to live in the very moment with God, not rehearsing the past or anticipating the future, just living with Him in my now. The “ministry of current” is freeing and allows us to fly unhindered. I don’t know about you, but when I am focused on my regrets of past failures, or fearing my future, I am stymied. I’m not talking about casting off responsibility; I’m speaking of my gaze–unbelief or Faith.

While doing this, I began to read de Caussade’s The Sacrament of the Present Moment.* Amazingly, right in the first paragraph of the first chapter there was highlighted for me the very point of this topic.

God still speaks today as He spoke to our forefathers in the days gone by, before there were either spiritual directors or methods of direction. The spiritual life was then a matter of immediate communication with God. It had not been reduced to a fine art nor was lofty and detailed guidance to it provided with a wealth of rules, instructions and maxims. These may very well be necessary today. But it was not so in those early days, when people were more direct and unsophisticated. All they knew was that each moment brought its appointed task, faithfully to be accomplished.

This was enough for the spiritually-minded of those days. All their attention was focused on the present, minute by minute; like the hand of a clock that marks the minutes of each hour covering the distance along which it has to travel. Constantly promoted by divine compulsion, they found themselves imperceptibly turned towards the next task that God had readied them for at each hour of the day.

WOW, the freedom of living in this present moment with God!

We have been discussing sovereignty and transcendence on the Shulamite Podcasts. The messages are so much life for me and for obvious reasons, there’s often spillover in the topics from one site to another. I so see that living in the satisfaction of sovereignty, as well as the joy of transcendence, is dependent on living in our current moment with God. How can we dwell on either side of our present moment and remain with God? The enemy dwells with a billy club (more like bully club!) on either side of NOW. It’s there that he is able to accuse me, as Jennifer wrote in “Never-ending Accusation.”

All I have is this present moment. Regrets can unendingly burden me with “What if?” and “If Only?” And to dread the future unduly weighs me down with what may never be. I have only one point to direct my life, like the needle on a record giving sound to my existence. My current moment is all I have to rudder my reality. And living in this simplicity directs my energy to the only source that is LIFE–His sovereign choice and transcendent move.

* The Sacrament of the Present Moment is also called Abandonment to Divine Providence and The Joy of Full Surrender