Today I woke up feeling like a plate lady. The balance of life with all these different components I’m trying to keep atop makes me feel like a woman straight out of the circus with seven plates being spun above her head. The audience is leaned forward sure one will fall and she will collapse to the ground in a roar of shattering noises after the plates smash into tiny pieces. I feel for that lady in the circus ring. Plate twirling is no easy business.
My current season feels like a similar balancing act of marriage, work, health, school, dreams, and more. I often feel overwhelmed by the demands of today that I find myself deciding that if I can just survive today, tomorrow I will thrive.
I think it’s my hopeful nature that keeps me believing for tomorrow’s green grass of goodness. And yet, in the midst of that, I inadvertently find myself negating the possibilities for today. These days I can be so quick to decide today doesn’t have room for things, that tomorrow will carry my hope.
You may be doing the same if it always comes back to tomorrow. Instead of giving today your presence, tomorrow becomes when you will rest, breathe, live, or accomplish. And so, you neglect today out of this false idea that tomorrow will allow the space to expel life’s anxious air and inhale grace’s presence.
So tomorrow becomes this picture of false and never-met promises. And today remains about survival.
On a day like today, feeling overwhelmed by my spinning plates, I wonder if I have painted tomorrow’s fate by deciding today does not have time for my dreams, my rest, and my wonder. Maybe I have strangled life from today by only hoping for tomorrow. And it’s made me realize something important:
It’s time to take back tomorrow’s promises.
It’s easy to complain about waiting for God in certain areas of our lives, often feeling the long enduring as tortuous or unfair. And yet, at the same time, we easily withhold from ourselves that which does not have to be waited upon. In fact, I wonder if maybe waiting wouldn’t feel as tortuous to us if we didn’t tack on to its pile all that is actually for us today.
I mean things like rest. It’s easy to narrow it down to a concept of time and space, planning for that far off day when there will be time to do nothing and simply rest. But in doing that, we take what is a promise for today – in this moment – and tag it as a rarely-experienced wish for sometime in the future. And now, what was offered as a promise becomes reduced to a mere wish.
Or what about grace? What would it look like if we offered grace to ourselves today versus purposefully punishing ourselves through days or months ahead before we partake of what is on the table for us. How much fuller, freer, and joyful would today be in an instance?
The truth is, Heaven longs to deposit that which is accessible today right into our midst.
And we can actually reap dreams, health, or rest today if we stop putting them as stock on the shelves of tomorrow.
So the question is, could you inhale deep what is gifted and created for you, and receive what God promised for you today?
2 Comments
I am always so thankful that the Lord uses you to speak directly to my heart! I’ve been saying I’m spinning plates for a while now, so you can imagine that I’m sitting here nearly in tears. 🙂 Love and MISS you and so thankful for you!!
So good. Saturating in this.