77 Zealous Inches

Bear with me as I try something here. I’m going to try and write something that will likely disenchant my entire readership because it belongs in the type of blog that uses a lot of decorative italic fonts and peaceful nature images. This type of blog would be authored by the type of person who describes themselves as “a mother, a wife, a human, a citizen of the world who has loved, languished, laughed, and lived every moment with joy and expectancy in what each new day will bring” in their About page.

Are they gone? Good. Okay. Ready? Lord bless this.

My Reflective and Quasi-Emotive Post

Let it be entered into the record books that today, April 19th of 2009, was perfect in every way that concerned the weather. There was just the perfect amount of briskness in the springtime morning air to make my hot coffee still enjoyable. Summer mornings around here aren’t like that and hot coffee is something to be tolerated instead of savored. I savored my coffee while I sat on a couch with a clear view of a beautiful ocean and listened to Mr. Setfree read to me about the importance of going Beyond Duty on my mp3 player. After word I got through a couple chapters of a real book – the kind that you hold in your hands and turn real pages instead of hitting “page down”. It was a treat. Throughout the whole morning I was very sensitive to my awareness of how much there is in my life to be savored.

Then the weather turned warm, very warm. Warm, no, hot enough to tan all 77 of my very white zealous inches. I soaked up a righteous podcast on the subject of faith in secular society while the sun’s rays worked very hard to make me a more attractive woman.

Invigorated, I set out to do my laundry (for Sunday is my laundry day) and I even enjoyed that.

Then off to the winery with good friends. Never mind no gas in the car and one wrong turn, these things don’t matter when you’re with good friends. We wined, we…..wait, we didn’t dine. We mostly just wined in a gorgeous winery setting with vines and fountains and all that peaceful artsy type of stuff. A guy sitting at a table 20 feet from ours started playing classical guitar. He was really good. The sun made everything look quite golden and we laughed a lot.

Here’s what made this day so great. The weather helped, certainly. Good friends were a pretty vital element. I also watched the hotel scene from Out of Sight and that’s a surefire way to improve anyone’s day. But the real reason it was a great day is because I consciously decided I was going to stop worrying about the gosh-darn future and simply just live – enjoy my coffee, enjoy my Word time, enjoy my book, enjoy my friends, enjoy my hotel scene – just enjoy my day off. When you turn off that part in your mind that faithfully brings up all that there is for you to worry about, even just for a day, suddenly the lights come on and you recognize everything around you that’s available to enjoy in that wonderful thing called the present.

For reasons that I’m not ready to blog about just yet, my future is looking……yeah, uncertain is a good word. It’s thrilling and exhilarating and every adjective in that vein but it’s also scary. Too many big decisions. It’s only April and I feel like I’ve lived a lifetime during this year already. I find myself (there I am) spending most of my day living in the future instead of the present. Most of it is worry. Then I worry about how much I worry and so I try to do things to alleviate my worry and then worry that I didn’t do those things well enough.

I like C.S. Lewis’ take on the whole subject from The Screwtape Letters. I learn so much from Screwtape:

The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present…..Our (demons) business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man
who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him.

Or, even simpler. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself” Mat. 6:34. It’s a lesson I was happy to learn today. I’ll be back at it come Monday morning because the future is still there and it’s gotta be dealt with. And as much as I worry about it, it really is as bright as God’s promises. But refusing to worry about the future for one day and just live entirely in the present made for a very nearly perfect day off. Try it sometime.

Two pictures from this nearly perfect day for the last of my friends who aren’t on Facebook.