By Amy ChengWednesday 11 Oct 2023Christian LivingReading Time: 6 minutes
In our busyness and desire to be everywhere at once, we are ruining our lives and missing the life God has given us, an author has said in his new book.
The book Faithfully Present by Adam Ramsey, lead pastor of Liberti Church on the Gold Coast and network director for Acts 29 Australia/New Zealand, is about embracing limitations.
“It’s not just embracing limitations for limitations sake, but for the sake of our own flourishing, the sake of our souls,” he told Hope 103.2.
“In one sense, recovering these limits is about us recovering our humanity… the idea of the book is we want to be attentive to the here and now of where God has us.”
An inspiration for Ramsey’s book is the quote by American novelist Wendell Berry: “We live the given life, and not the planned”.
“We all have an idea in our minds of how we think life should be and how life should go, but then real life happens,” Ramsey said.
“We need to learn to be attentive to God and to others in the life that we do have, not in the life that we think we should have.”
“We live the given life, and not the planned” – American novelist Wendell Berry
Time and place
The book is divided into two sections: time and place.
“What often happens is we try to escape from this time and live some when-else – in the past, in the good old days or the future we want to be or somewhere else,” he said.
“And the reality is that when we try to be omnipresent, which belongs to God alone… the illusion of that is that we end up ruining our presence in this time and place.
“We end up missing the life that God has actually given us, even as we keep existing our way through it.”
Ramsey said the solution to this is learning how to be attentive to God in the “whole time of my life” with the knowledge that our time is in His hands.
“Every single person, believer or not, wants to live well within the time that they have in this world.”
The second part of the book is about the impact of place in our lives.
“Time locates us, but also place locates us – God gives you and I one body to live in for the rest of our lives,” Ramsey said.
“That one body can only live in one place at a time, with a specific number of relationships around us, at any given point in time.”
He says in his book that “time limits us by way of duration, place limits us by way of location” and to be faithfully present it is important to recognise the place God has put us in.
“What often happens is we try to escape from this time and live some when-else,” – Adam Ramsey, author
Being faithfully present
The idea of being “faithfully present” rather than just present comes from the character of God, who is faithful and present, Ramsey said.
“If God is faithfully present and we are to follow Him… then we should cultivate faithfulness and presence when it comes to him and people around us… so, we’re imaging what God is to us.”
This begins with trusting in God and “trust cannot be separated from living well within time”, which the psalmist articulates well in Psalm 31:14-15, he said.
“I love that – just in that verse alone there – our trust, God’s Godness and our making peace with the fact that we’re not God, we’re human, and He’s numbered our days, now times are in His hand.
“It’s all woven together; our time belongs to him, we belong to Him and so us being faithfully present, in whatever season of life we’re in, whatever space of this world we’re in, comes back to really an issue of trust – will I and can I trust God in this space, in this time?”
“Our time belongs to him, we belong to Him and so us being faithfully present, in whatever season of life we’re in, whatever space of this world we’re in, comes back to really an issue of trust,” – Adam Ramsey
Faithful presence in difficult times
Ramsey and his family have been learning to “live and embrace the lessons of faithful presence” in their lives.
A few years ago, his wife Kristina was diagnosed with a severe vaccine injury, which affected her whole body and resulted in various problems, including myocarditis, pericarditis, inflammation of the brain and inflammation of the esophagus.
“It really did her a number, in light of Wendell Berry’s words, we are learning to live the given life and not the planned; it’s not what we want, it’s not what we would have chosen and yet it is where we are,” Ramsey said.
“In light of that, how do we as a family, how do we as a married couple, how does my wife as a follower of Jesus, live faithfully present in this season of life, even as she and we long for a future season of life where the pain and the chronic suffering has come to an end?
“I think the worst thing that we could do is to see this time, in this season, painful as it is, as wasted time or as in-between time.”
A comfort to them has been the knowledge of God’s faithful presence.
“This season of life, this part of life, God inhabits it with us, God is faithful to us and God is present with us and with us through it all,” he said.
“And that means we actually can flourish, even in times of difficulty and hardship because of God’s faithful presence to us.”
“I think the worst thing that we could do is to see this time, in this season, painful as it is, as wasted time or as in-between time,” – Adam Ramsey
Are you faithfully present?
Ramsey has a question to help people work out if they are faithfully present.
“It’s asking yourself the question: how often am I pausing to give thanks, in worshipful gratitude to God, for the life that I’m in?” he said.
“And if the answer is ‘I can’t even remember the last time I paused at a smaller level, at a larger level’, then that’s probably a pretty good indicator; think of it as a red light on the dashboard of your life.”
Pause, reflect and give thanks
A good way to start being more faithfully present is to pause, Ramsey said.
“I have a little rhythm where I just put it into my phone, where three times a day I have a little reminder come up in my phone that just says ‘Selah’.”
Selah is a Hebrew word that appears throughout the Psalms; although it is debatable what the exact meaning of the word is, most believe it to be a technical word for musical pieces to signify a pause.
“I have that in the morning, before lunch and then again at the end of the day – pause and reflect, take five minutes, be still before God, pause, reflect, give thanks, confess sin and press on.”
For his reflections, he looks back at how God has been at work in his life.
“My reflection is to look at where have I experienced and seen the goodness of God, the hand of God, the wisdom of God, the presence of God, the leading of the Spirit at different moments throughout the day.”
The message that Ramsey wants readers to take away from his book is that they don’t need to live in fear.
“They don’t need to be afraid ever again in this life that they have, however long it is, wherever it’s lived at… when they are aware that God Himself is present within each time and each place that they are and God Himself stands sovereign over their time.
“But I know I’m going to be afraid… I know I’m going to have to fight against the anxieties of a future, but the way that I preach to my own heart is I remember that God is reigning in the future, too; and therefore, what basis do my fears have?”
Faithfully Present is available now.
Feature image: Adam Ramsey Facebook