As humans we tend to spend a lot of time living in the past or future….it seems there is no time for living in the now.
We want to argue over or change the past and 
we want to ‘figure out’ the future. So we often don’t live fully in the present, in the moment. Worry about tomorrow and angst about yesterday take our eyes off the beauty of the here and now.
When we don’t live in the present, we often miss what God is doing around us. We miss out on His best because we are focused on our worst or our best.
The image below is small representation of the vast amount of time we often spend thinking of the past and future. The past and the future are both enormous….yet the now is small, the now is now…this instant. It’s a sliver of time, but it’s the only real time, the time we have to “be”.
When we move forward into the future (which doesn’t exist) or back to the past (which doesn’t exist) we are, in fact, moving into realms of fantasy. Let’s keep it real….let’s move diligently forward in the present trusting in an all-power, all-loving God who has His eye on us and has great plans for our todays.
Release the past
Philippians 3:13: Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.
Isaiah 43:18-19 (NIV) “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.”
Stay out of the future
Matthew 6:25-34 (ESV) “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will (in the future) put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (emphasis added)
Philippians 4:6 (NASB) (regarding the future) Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
Living in the Present
Isaiah 26:3 – You will keep in perfect peace him whose trust is steadfast, because he trusts in you”
