Present and Presence

It seems that us church folks love to focus on the past and on the future of God’s history, while neglecting the present. We study the history of God, what He has done and how He has done it… i.e. creation, covenant, laws, relationships with men and women, ext…

And we study the future reign of God and how He will return. Who will be receiving His wrath and why they will according to the history that we know of God.

We stretch out our arms grabbing with our left hand the past of God, and use our right hand to stretch out to the future of God and pull them together to create a kind of life that is chalked full of God stories and God vision.

Yet, the part of the story of God is that He is not just a God of the past and the future, but He is also a God of the present. In fact I believe that God does not adhere to the same time and space laws we do. He is somehow always present, He is somehow still able to see and interact with times past and is already waiting in times future.

And He calls us out of our history books and future prophecies to dwell with Him here and now, specifically through the laying down of our lives and reception of His eternal, everlasting, abundant life that is held in His all-powerful tight grip.

On the other hand there is a life of living IN the Spirit of God that overflows from the present to make our timelines all “mush”. A life that sees death coming and laughs “for to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

There is a life that makes since of the stories… and makes way for stories to be written, even today, of God miraculously changing the world through mere humans.

This is what a life of God is all about, His present and His presence.