Wisdom for Life: Dealing with the Future - Richard E. Simmons III

I believe we have a tendency to live out the future in our imagination before it arrives.

For many of us, our lives are truly out of sync with time because we’re always anticipating the future. We all are always trying to rearrange our lives around future expectations of happiness. Blaise Pascal says this:

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up... We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does... We almost never think of the present and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.

The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone, our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

If we have dealt with our past and we live at peace with our future, as we look to the future, you know what C.S. Lewis tells us, then we’re able to truly love in the present, in the now. He says, why? Because we will have dealt with all of the obstacles to love.

Now think about it. The past our faith is built on. The future, there’s hope. In the present, there is love. If you’re familiar with the great love chapter, Paul says faith, hope and love. He says, this is the essence of life.