Always Getting Ready to Live

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” — Matthew 6:34 (KJV)

Have you ever thought, “I’ll be happy when…”? When the exams are over. When I’m sixteen. When I’ve got that phone. When I’m out of school. When I’m in a relationship. When the holidays come.

Pascal noticed that we are almost never living in the present moment. We are either replaying the past or planning the future.

“The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”

That is a sharp observation. If happiness is always “when”, it never actually arrives, because as soon as you get there, there is a new “when”. You finish the exams and start worrying about results. You get the phone and want the next one.

Pascal says that experience keeps fooling us. Something doesn’t satisfy us, so we think the next thing will. It doesn’t, so we try again, always hoping that this time will be different. He describes it like this: experience dupes us, and from misfortune to misfortune leads us to death.

Jesus spoke into exactly this restlessness. He told his followers not to be anxious about tomorrow, because tomorrow will take care of itself. That is not an instruction to stop planning or to give up on your future. It is an invitation to stop living somewhere else, in your worries or your daydreams, and to live today, with God, here.

This matters because God is not in the “when”. He is in the now. You will never meet him in a future that hasn’t happened yet or a past you can’t change. You meet him in this moment, this conversation, this task, this walk home.

Pascal also notices how much we dodge the present when it is uncomfortable. If now is painful or dull, we jump ahead in our minds to somewhere nicer. But that means we never deal with what is actually in front of us, and we never discover that God is with us in it.

None of this means your hopes and plans are wrong. It means they can’t carry the weight of your happiness. Only God can do that, and he is here today.

One thing to do this week: each evening this week, write down one good thing that happened today, not tomorrow or yesterday, and thank God for it. When you catch yourself thinking “I’ll be happy when…”, pause and say, “Lord, you are here now.”