Imagine your life up to now as a timeline, scrawled in marker, taped to a wall. How would you describe the path that brought you to today?
Perhaps today had to happen—sometimes it feels that way. Tolstoy compared history to a clock: events proceed according to ordered inevitabilities just as “the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time.” Every event is “a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history” (War and Peace, tr. Louis and Aymer Maude, 276).
This view of history fails to appreciate human freedom and the mysterious nature of Divine Providence. But even if we acknowledge these truths in the abstract, we might still imagine our lives in a deterministic way, especially as we look to the future.
We can remain fettered by fear if we assume that the future unfolds necessarily from our present situation. For example, we might imagine that our difficulties in prayer now will never pass in days to come. Fr. Donald Haggerty describes this fear well: “It is possible … that for periods of time we will experience nothing of God but our distance from him and a numbing disengagement from his presence…. As the days stretch one into another, we can easily think that our passion for God has been lost permanently. But we should not yield to such fears” (The Contemplative Hunger, 208–209).
A similar fear can manifest itself in other aspects of our lives. Will the financial struggles or the family tensions and misunderstandings of today necessarily last until tomorrow, next month, or even ten years from now? Will the gnawing sense of loss at the recent death of a parent always remain raw? Consider the state of our country. Is decline inevitable? Must untruths or half-truths dominate public discourse? Is violence unquellable? Perhaps decline and lies and violence will continue to make headlines, but we make a mistake if we determine the obscurity of the future by the facts of today.
Today must be endured or enjoyed as it is, in patience, but the future is not determined by today. In hard times, the contingency of the future can be a comfort. But even more comforting than the potential for a better life is the certainty of Christian hope.
The timeline of the rest of our lives remains to be lived. But we do not set forth into the future on uncertain terms. The truest description of what brought you to today begins with a story of divine love. God, the author of everything, considered you a character worth writing, a person worth dying for. That truth remains the same, regardless of the weakness of our prayer today, regardless of the struggles ahead. Because we are convinced “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38–39).
We do not know the future, nor do we live in fear of it. God has brought us to this day; he will be with us to the end. Nothing that is to come can change that.
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Image: Clock by Deavmi (CC BY-SA 3.0)
