Yesterday is gone, Tomorrow is coming, Now is our need for God's Presence!

Yesterday is gone, Tomorrow is coming, Now is our need for God’s Presence!

How often pessimists agonize over yesterday’s failures and wish they could have them back.  Optimists love to surmise what tomorrow might bring and they can’t wait until the sun rises with news of greatness.  Placing ourselves in the midst of the past or the surprise of the morrow, we have passed the opportunity to realize where we are right now.  

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet their heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not more important than they?   (Mt 6: 1 - 34).

Of course, Jesus was aware that man must do something to prepare his life for the next day, but it is the person that frets over his mistakes that he cannot change, and the unknown that awaits him tomorrow.  Neither of these should become the weight of his world concerns.  

Worrying is one of the most futile or purposeless things that people can do.  Unless your worry can tangibly help you identify solutions that you can implement to prevent a negative outcome, worry is often something that people do to feel as though yhay are being productive when really they’re only creating more distress for themselves.  (taken from Psychology Today, by Elyssa Barbash, Ph.D.)

Perhaps too many people who appear to be lost in a world where wealth and pride of their accomplishments have succumbed to the weight that hangs around our cranium only to develop a psychosis of our intellect draining our interior energy to a point of despair.  Ulcers have become the one physical malady that confronts many business tycoons when their dreams of success become a living nightmare.  Then there are numbers of those at the top of their position who commit suicide or are on the verge of self-destruction when their dreams awaken them to signs of failure.

Spiritual anxiety of an unbelieving society has become the number one trauma in our present humanity of worrying people.  When Jesus was relating our dependence of God it was so we would not become slaves to the obvious signs of failure when God is constantly watching over us.  He was preparing his disciples to go forth and proclaim the Good News of salvation to the needy.  However, if we are given a mandate to preach the word with exuberance, we shall fail if our success is clouded with the anxiety of past and future difficulties that were and are not yet ahead of them.  Can you imagine standing before a congregation about to preach God’s word with the fears of what may be ahead of you tomorrow?  It won't work and any proposed theorem you might have extolled will become a lot of words without meaning.

We must rely on the presence of the Holy Spirit to get us through our present discipline and depend on the word of God from within our acceptance of allowing the past and future to disappear from our preparation of speaking for God in the present tense.

Ralph B. Hathaway