The Sacred Present

I was remarking to a friend the other day that what with preoccupation with another friend’s grief and sickness of my own, I’ve been moving through my days more slowly than normal. Almost deliberately. Unable to process the next task till I’m done with the task at hand. Refusing to let my tired mind be muddled with what I can’t do anything about right that minute. But it’s been refreshing, in its own way, as I normally find myself thinking at least three or four steps beyond whatever I’m doing. I hear God’s whisper in my weakness–perhaps because of such enforced quiet. ‘Take no thought for tomorrow…’ And perhaps that’s why this passage in dear old George MacDonald meant so much to me today:  

The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years–in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.

The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till you lay the book aside to leap upon you–that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life. "No, mine is a reasonable care–and unavoidable care, indeed." Is it something that you have to do at this very moment? "No." Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is required of you this moment. "There is nothing required of me at this moment." Nay, but there is–the greatest thing that can be required of man. Trust in the Living God…