My husband and I were excited about our wedding.
We were giddy at the prospect of a honeymoon.
We had spent many of our summers apart and had only lived previously at our parents’ homes and in college dorms. The prospect of a week of vacation, of the freedom of being alone together as much as we wanted for as long as we wanted, beckoned.
The wedding was wonderful. Our family and friends turned out in force. We shared cake and good food and received so many wonderful well wishes I still smile thinking of it. Beaming, we left the church under a curtain of bubbles blown by the attendees, dashed to the car, and drove to my parents’ house to change and grab our suitcases.
Except we couldn’t get in.
Bewildered, we stood on the porch of my parents’ empty house, me in my white wedding dress and he in his tux, and laughed ourselves senseless. We had all forgotten the key! We tried to get into the house through other means and failed. But there was no way we could take on a drive to the beach in all our wedding gear. Recognizing that there would be no honeymoon without getting into the house, we sheepishly got into the car…
…and drove back to the church.
I don’t think many people have had the opportunity of sending the bride and groom off in style only to have them boomerang back. I still remember the bemused look on the faces of the stragglers, already helping to clean up, as our car with its jaunty “Just Married!” poster rolled up in the parking lot.
We peeked into the fellowship hall at the remnants of cake, decorations coming down, women in the church kitchen packing up leftovers. “Hi,” we both said, sheepishly. I found my mom among the crowd. “Um, can we have your keys?”
There’s nothing quite so awkward as having to linger when you want to be on your way.
A recent sermon reminded me that most of us spend our lives waiting for the next big thing. And I’m certainly no exception. In middle school I yearned to be one of the impossibly cool high schoolers who drove a car and drank cappuccinos. In high school, I waited for my turn to be the independent college student. In college, I dreamed of a career, and so on, and so forth.
It is, I think, a human instinct to think about next. Okay, I did this, what comes after? Where do I go from here? Where do I turn my gaze? Where do I direct my steps?
The answers in Scripture can often seem unappealing. When the Israelites wanted to go somewhere, God’s answer was inevitably something like go to the place you don’t like or wait and see or even sometimes get comfortable where you are.
It is hard, it is infuriating at times, to live in the now.
The now is never where we want to be. The now is at the doctor’s office trying not to touch the armrests on the chairs and averting your face from the kid sneezing wildly in your direction. The now is the traffic that has slowed to a crawl. The now is the house that seems to be falling into disrepair faster than you can keep up. The now is the family member won’t stop annoying you. The now is the career that feels just fine but could be a lot better.
Live in the present moment, mindfulness guides instruct us. And that’s fine, but it also ignores the fact that the present moment is a total pain. It’s one thing to focus on “the present moment” from the confines of a pedicure chair or your vacation in Tahiti. It’s quite another to do so at the bed of an ailing loved one, in hour seven of a miserable workday, at the end of a day of chronic pain.
The now is hard because in the now, we never have the resources to get where we want to go, or to be where we want to be.
My husband has an allergic reaction to the phrase “hold on” coming from me. He knows exactly what it means. It is the language I employ when we’re going somewhere nice and I can’t make myself look right.
Hold on…my hair won’t lay right.
Hold on…does this purse make sense with this dress?
Hold on…does yellow make me look sick?
Hold on…in the wrong kind of light can you see my underwear through this dress?!
I don’t like to leave until I feel like I’m impeccable. I feel like I’m impeccable .9% of the time. You see the problem.
Our issue with the “now” is the same. We want to wait until the now turns into something better. Once this job is fixed, God, then we’ll… Lord if only you’d help calm this pain, these storms, this person… Lord, if I could just find the energy…
It is in this moment that God works. And God works in this moment in ways that are not always getting you out of this moment and to a better one. The work is incremental and slow. You might not see the result immediately, or ever. It’s a hard practice, settling into this place. But a critical one.
When we settle into the right-now, whatever that is, no matter how badly we want to live, we’re acknowledging with life and limb that our priorities for our own life are not the most critical. It is the hardest, the very hardest, lesson of obedience. By accepting where we are and not focusing our attention on where we should be next, we are living out trust in God’s purposes and ways and an active indifference to our own wants.
I’ll close with a story.
My right-now, in the context of career, is muddled and uncertain. I’m not currently in a situation I would have chosen for myself. I love what I do, but some external difficulties have cropped up that have made my job maddening at the best of times and miserable at the worst.
In January, God made it clear to me through several can’t-miss-‘em signs that He’s opening a path to somewhere else. My job is to wait. But heaven have mercy, I really want the right-now to be done. I am so, so ready for it to be over. I dream, quite frequently, about what it will be like when…
And yet being in this position has made me more compassionate. I’ve become more understanding of colleagues, more apt to lift up someone who seems to be facing a challenge rather than be frustrated by my problems working with them. I’ve made new friends. I have been forced to grow in surprising ways. I am evolving into a different me because I am still here.
And I suspect God finds that more valuable than wherever he has in mind for me to go.
There’s no point in pretending the right-now is wonderful. It’s okay to acknowledge that it’s painful or difficult, that you’re weary. Read the Psalms, which contains several long wails about the right-nows. But recognize that in this awkward moment of wanting-to-be-elsewhere, God is doing valuable work in you—
And that sometimes, simply staying put is the most obedient act of all.
Samaritan's Song 