Living (in the Present)
“How often do we hear people uttering familiar phrases like: “Once I get my life in order, I’ll start.” “Once I pay off my loan.” “Once I lose weight.” “Once I get my vacation, then…” Taken individually, there’s nothing alarming about these phrases. What becomes alarming is when they add up to form an entire life. It’s as if a person is writing a draft of his life, hoping to one day rewrite it in a final draft. He lives in a state of a dress rehearsal, but the performance never gets underway.” (Viktor Luzhkov)
“We must not be distracted from living faithfully in the present by fantasizing about how much better we imagine our path would be if we lived elsewhere or had different callings in life. We must not live in the past or in the future but simply focus on uniting ourselves to Christ in holiness as we actually are in this world. Our best opportunities for healing and transformation may well be in the dimensions of our lives that we are strongly tempted to escape for the sake of a delusional spirituality.” (Fr. Philip LeMasters)
“Allow yourself to be imperfect. A perfectionist doesn’t start because he’s afraid of doing something poorly. But something poorly done is still done, whereas something perfectly conceived isn’t. There’s even a therapeutic rule: “good enough.” Not “perfect,” but “good enough to keep going.” The Holy Fathers would put it differently: Don’t put off a good deed if you can do it today, because death doesn’t care whether you’ve managed to do it or not. It will become obvious that our list of pending tasks won’t go anywhere until we ourselves stop waiting. Life doesn’t start somewhere beyond the horizon, at a point we need to reach. It’s happening right now, as you read these lines, in this very room, on this very day. And we don’t have another day. ‘Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation’ (2 Cor. 6:2). Not later. Now.” (Viktor Luzhkov)
“For He says: “In an acceptable time I have heard You, and in the day of salvation I have helped You.” Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation. (2 Corinthians 6:2) Right now! Now is the day of salvation. Many have noted that our only connection to time is the now. The past is gone and the future does not yet exist. Nevertheless we spend a great deal of our time ruminating on the past or anticipating the future. In doing so, we sometimes miss things right before our eyes.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“One of our main problems when it comes to dealing with our problems is our perception of them and the order of the actions we take. Many times we allow our anxiety to get the better of us by focusing on the potential negative outcomes that have yet to happen. As Mark Twain famously quipped, ‘I’m an old man now and have had a great many problems. Most of them never happened.’ We complicate this by taking our problems to prayer and turning them over to God (releasing control to Him) as a last resort, and only when we have exhausted our ingenuity to solve them. It’s amazing how much better we feel and how more effectively we act to solve them when we turn problems over to Him first. By doing so, we act in cooperation with Him and stay focused in the present and not on an imagined future.” (Sacramental Living Ministries)
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