Tomorrow

Today, more than any other day of the year, we confess that we live with eyes for tomorrow. We confess that we are looking ahead to fresh starts, to new opportunities, to the first morning of a new year. Yes, tomorrow...

Tomorrow, we will do the things we want to do today. Tomorrow, we will begin the things we should have started long ago. Tomorrow, we will wake up with new eyes and a fresh vision. And, by the grace of God, it seems, a new hope. 

Today, the whole world revolves around tomorrow. 

And this is one of the constant challenges, one of the ongoing struggles for Christians, both now and in the world to come. We live with eyes for tomorrow, and we can live with eyes for tomorrow so strongly that we spend all of today looking at it. 

For a lot of Christians, the best, most awesome, most important thing God is ever going to do comes "tomorrow." It comes after death. It comes at eternity. It comes when this life is over and a new life has begun, when our eyes close and then open again to a new vision, a new hope. A promise fulfilled that has finally come to life. 

At the same time, while we prepare for this kind of tomorrow, it feels so wholly other that it doesn't seem to have a lot of relevance to today. Today...today just feels like wasted space. Today just feels like one more period of time to slog through. Today just seems like, well, like today, when tomorrow is where it's at. 

So most of us don't bother living today like we want to live tomorrow. We don't invest today's energies into the kind of eternity that we want to have. We don't live with hope and faith and joy and love because that stuff? That stuff's for tomorrow. Today is just today. 

And we're missing it. 

We're missing today. We're missing our chance to get a jump start on things. We're missing our chance to make today our tomorrow, to make this day our day for new things. For fresh starts and new opportunities and the first morning of the rest of our lives. We're missing a whole period of time in which we could be living like tomorrow is already come, and in doing so, we're missing out on the glory of today and everything that it offers. 

All for a tomorrow that isn't here yet. 

It's the challenge of being a faithful people. It's the challenge of knowing what tomorrow brings but being stuck as sojourners yet today. 

But the dirty little secret this world, with all its clocks and calendars and schedules, doesn't want you to know is that today has just as much hope as tomorrow. It always has. 

The question we have to ask ourselves, as people of the greatest hope, is, what are we waiting for? What do we think we can do tomorrow that we can't do today?