Today

There's a bit of trouble with today, with knowing that today is the only day you ever truly have on this side of eternity, and that is the danger of trying to live with too much hope. 

Too much hope seems like not a problem at all on the surface. After all, our God is the Creator of the heavens and earth, and His promises to us are good. How could believing in those promises and holding onto them be too much hope? 

Simply put, when it becomes intolerable for us to live that way. 

Here's what I mean: 

When you understand that time is a construct of man and not of God and that literally any moment could be the one in which He answers your prayer, it can be tempting to start living as though every next moment is going to be the one in which He answers your prayer. It can be tempting to keep putting things off because hey, give me one more breath and it will all be easier. It will be the way I've been praying for it to be. 

It can become paralyzing, but because we couch it in such Christian-sounding language, we miss how paralyzing it actually is. 

It looks good on the outside - believing in God for the next breath. It becomes praying to God with every breath, because you believe so much that the next one is the one that changes things. Waiting with confident assurance, knowing that God can do it, believing that He is going to do it. All of a sudden, you become a person who is "living by faith." 

Except...you aren't actually living. You're stuck doing nothing at all but waiting, and not even faithful waiting. Because you're not actively engaged in the life that you have. You're wasting one breath at a time in anticipation of the next one, and this is kind of exactly what the Bible warns about when it talks about making big plans for what you're going to do tomorrow when you don't even know if you'll be here tomorrow. 

Same thing. You spend your whole life making plans for what happens when that one moment comes, when God finally answers your prayer, and you live moment-by-moment planning only for the next one and never actually living the one that you have. 

Yesterday, we talked about giving up on today too early and starting to pray for tomorrow; the type of living we're talking about today lives so much in tomorrow that it completely misses today. 

It seems to be our perpetual problem, no matter which direction we come at it from. 

So, then, our challenge is to live today, knowing it is all that we have, while also believing we are just one breath away from the kind of life we hoped to have. Because we are always no more than a half-blink away from a moment when God could answer our prayer and change everything. 

As much as we should believe in that, hope in that, trust in that, and wait for that, we can't wait idly; we have to live the moment we have, lest we lose it, too. 

How much of your life have you lost waiting on it to get better?