Living in the Present

I hope your year is off to a great start!  I’m writing this a couple of days before the end of the year, but it will be a new year by the time you receive it.  2019.  That hardly sounds possible, but it’s true.  It is 2019, or at least it will be by the time you read this.

It’s amazing how the time goes, you know?  A few days before Christmas, I turned sixty.  Maybe that sounds old to you.  Maybe it doesn’t.  It depends on how you are now, probably.  If you’re older than sixty, maybe it does not seem like much to you now.  I suspect it did, though when you actually turned sixty.

Sixty is kind of a milestone.  You start thinking about things.  You start thinking about how long you can keep doing what you’re doing.  Don’t get me wrong, I have no present plans to retire.  I continue to love what I do, and so far I have not noticed any significant decrease in my energy level or in my enthusiasm.  I also have no significant health problems, which is a blessing. 

But still, you do start to think about things.  Because you know, when you reach a certain age, that certain physical things are not going to get better.  The best you can do is hope to stay where you are for a while, and then do what you can to make the decline slow and not swift.  And of course, there are things that could happen that you have no control over--accidents, illnesses, etc.  And you have no way to know if or when something like that will happen.

You think about it, and then you pray about it.  And then, you know what you do?  Well, if you’re me, you decide to stop thinking about it, or at least to try to.  You decide to let it go.  Because while I wonder about those things, I have no way to get any answers to them.  I had no idea, fifteen years ago, what my life would be like now.  I have no idea now what my life will be like fifteen years from now.  Besides, I’ve never been any good at making long-term plans anyway. 

So it seems to me that the best thing for me to do is to keep doing what I’ve always done.  That is to live in the present.  It’s to do my best in the place I am and with the things God has given me to do.  When God has something else for me to do, God will let me know about it.  God let me know when it was time to leave state government and go into private law practice.  God let me know when it was time to leave private law practice and go into the ministry.  When the time comes for me to leave ministry, either to retire or simply to do something else, I’m pretty sure God will let me know that, too.

So let’s just all keep living in the present.  And let’s make that present the best we can make it.  There’s plenty of life in the old boy yet!