Phantoms of the future

Read Matthew 6:34

Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now,and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes. (THE MESSAGE)

We rarely worry about this precise present moment. We may be anxious about something that happened in the past,or more commonly about something that may or may not happen in the future. In doing so,we may miss out on what God is doing in this precise present moment. Phantoms of the future cause us to be blind to the realities of the present.

Worrying about the future tends to magnify all the threats. We play the ‘what if’ game with ferocious tenacity,wearing ourselves out in the process. When we become preoccupied about the future we actually rehearse over and over again all the possibilities. By the time that future becomes present we are already exhausted. And we have wasted valuable ‘present’ time by our preoccupation with the future.

The future does not actually exist. All that exists is the present. We are to live fully and gladly in the present trusting that whatever will happen to us will not be faced alone. God gives us the resources to cope with the real present not the non-existent future. Those fearsome phantoms flooding our imagination will become manageable in the providence of God.

We are not to let the possibilities of tomorrow rob us of the certainties of today.

Blessings
David Reay