Embrace The Present

“The world in front of you is nothing like the world behind you.”

-Todd Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains

When your mother gave birth, it ushered you into a very different world where you had to breathe independently. The world got more expansive when you got your driver’s license. When we graduate high school or college, most enter a new world of responsibility. When the wall came down between East and West Germany, the world changed radically for Germans. When the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (the Southern Church) and the United Presbyterian Church (The Northern Church) reunited in 1983, lengthy Articles of Agreement changed how those two denominations began to live together. You get the point. Significant changes to life and history required adaptation. The world we knew must be left behind because the world in front of us is nothing like the one behind us.

The truth is that we don’t have any power to control many of these significant changes in life. Pretending like things are the same or pining for the good old days robs us of the present life we could have. Remember the Israelites who spent 40 years in the desert when the journey from Egypt to the Promise Land should have taken 11 days? Humans are slow to adapt, and we are conservative at heart. The whole discipline of science is based on “fact.” But science itself continues to evolve. What is a fact today may change tomorrow as the journey of knowledge grows.

The same is true in a life of faith. In the Reformed Tradition of the Christian Faith, we say we are “Reformed and always reforming.”

We understand that we need to be constantly adapting. Sanctification is a theological term that reminds us that as we acknowledge sin and receive God’s grace, we grow in faith and Christian witness. Yet, we are slow to let go of outdated theological concepts and craft new meaningful ways to understand and talk about God with us. The narrative of the Bible is a progressive revelation.

The people of God are constantly adapting timeless truths of God’s love and presence to new realities. The Ten Commandments were adapted to new situations in the book of Leviticus and ongoing Jewish history in the Mishna and Gomorrah.

Different forms of worship developed for times when the Israelites were in exile and returned to rebuild the Temple. Jesus even adapts Jewish Law to circumstances in his “You have heard it said…But I say to you…” statement in Matthew 5:20-48.

So why do we find it so hard to adapt? Dr. Ronald Heifetz, Nobel and Senior Lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Management, says, “what people resist is not change but loss.” Paul, writing in his second letter to the Corinthians acknowledging their fear, says this: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (II Cor. 5:17). We need to learn how to grieve what needs to be left behind and fully and gratefully receive the present the moment.