Live for Now

**A devotion written for and given to the women in the Mothers of Preschoolers group at First Presbyterian Church of Granada Hills, CA in January of 2013.

So there is this billboard I keep passing around town that is a Pepsi ad. It’s tag line that keeps catching my attention says “Pepsi. Live for Now.” The first time I passed it my initial reaction was “that’s kind of what’s wrong with our culture today…everyone running around living for now…living for the moment….doing what feels good and right in the moment with no thought about future consequences or the impact our choices have on our own futures or the futures of others.” The next several times I drove by it I had the same reaction. It seemed selfish to me to live for now…this billboard seemed to be saying to me “go ahead, do what you want, life is short, it’s okay to throw responsibility to the wind and live for the moment.” I didn’t feel like our society really needed more permission to behave this way, and every time I went by this billboard I found myself irritated at Pepsi.

I passed it again yesterday and for some reason its message struck me a completely different way—in a way I’m not sure the masterminds behind Pepsi’s advertising intended, but in a way I thought I’d share with you. I’ve been working on my 2011 family scrapbook this past weekend, so the events of that year are fresh in my mind and heart right now. 2011 was a bittersweet year if I’ve ever had one, and through the experiences of the year God patiently taught me over and over again to stay in the present, to not worry about, plan or control the future. In essence, God was teaching me to “live for now.”

In January of 2011 my husband and I both finished up our masters of divinity degrees from Fuller Seminary, packed up our apartment in Pasadena, said goodbye to close friends and headed north up I-5 to the new townhouse we had just purchased in Seattle, WA. Charles had just been given the job as youth director at a church there, and I was going to be helping him out, working along side him, using my degree and training as well while we settled in and prepared to start a family. We moved in Martin Luther King weekend of 2011 and on January 18th he started his job. I was looking back on my journal entries of that winter and realized it only took 3 weeks of working at this church before I wrote the words “Lord, did we make a huge mistake?” It’s a long story but we quickly realized the church we were serving at wasn’t exactly the church that had been described to us in the interview process. The next several months were full of literally working 70+ hour weeks, panic attacks, trusting the wrong people, learning a lot of lessons the hard way, and feeling utterly & completely exhausted and burned out. And we found out in the midst of all this that I was pregnant.

We shared our exciting news with the pastor and mentioned that over the next 9 months we might need to make some changes to our current youth schedule, there wasn’t any way we could keep us that kind of pace when a baby was added to our family. Two weeks later, in mid-june, he called my husband into his office one Wednesday morning. He was told they had voted at their elders meeting the night before and had decided that he wasn’t the right youth director for their church, that he was being let go immediately.

Honestly our first reaction was “oh thank God we never have to go back to that place, it was killing us.” But our next reaction was “holy crap! We are 9 weeks pregnant, we just bought a house, we have absolutely no idea what is next!” Plus, we were hurt. We were so angry and so disillusioned by everything that had happened in the past 6 months.

If there are a few adjectives I could use to describe myself it would be “planner,” “control freak” and “not a fan of surprises!” Needless to say I wasn’t a huge fan of what God was doing. I kept trying to trust that whatever he had in store for us had to be better, but I wanted so so badly to know the “whats” and “whens” and “hows.” We started another nation-wide job search, there were no youth director jobs in Seattle at that time, so we knew staying there wasn’t going to be likely. Doors seemed to be closing right and left throughout that summer. We kept having this feeling that we were waiting for something but we just hadn’t figured out what it was yet. We did a lot of traveling, spent a lot of time with family, and Charles even spent the whole month of August at a camp in the middle of nowhere in northern Minnesota doing some youth ministry training and a lot of healing. In mid-September the job here at First Pres literally fell in our laps. God worked through some amazing logistics and details and circumstances to bring us right back here, not far from where we started our 2011 journey, to a staff full of close friends of ours from Fuller, to a community that has embraced us and our child wholeheartedly from the beginning. It was an incredible whirlwind of a fall last year—selling our house, moving down here and in with a family from the church for a month while we figured out where we were going to live, getting health insurance switched and finding a new OB at 32 weeks pregnant. We moved into our apartment over Thanksgiving of 2011, spent December getting settled, and Aidan was born MLK weekend of 2012—a perfect beautiful bookend to our bittersweet journey of 2011.

Through it all, the recurring theme kept being “stay in today. Live for now. You can’t do anything about your future until I choose to reveal it, so do not worry.” In the moment, it was excruciating, but for the first time in my life I felt so strongly that God was somehow in control. God was bringing us through the desert into a place he was preparing for us, and that somehow it was all going to fall into place before this baby arrived. I swung back and forth between panic and peace. But I started to slowly understand what scripture meant when Jesus tells us in Matthew “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Live for now. We have so many things in life we can get caught up in worrying about. Finances, health, education, our marriages, jobs…the list goes on and on. But Jesus invites us to let go of those things, to not live in a state of fear and panic about the future. He invites us to live in this day. In this moment. Maybe not exactly in the way the Pepsi folks meant it when they chose their slogan, but I think by choosing to live in the here and now is our way of saying “okay God, I trust you. I can’t see around the corner. I can’t see what’s coming up, and that scares me to death, but I choose to trust you.” What is looming on your horizons this year that has you worried? What can we place into the hands of Jesus? He already knows what is on your heart, let Him work out the details, He will take care of us. He promised.