To live in the past and the future is easy...

"To live in the past and the future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle." Walker Percy, Lancelot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, p. 235)

I, for one, really like "living in the past;" mine and everybody else's. My book shelves are filled with biographies and history books. I remember and retell things that happened to me in my life and I have become the semi-official keeper of the family stories as the older generation has faded away.

Living in the past is pretty easy. The worst that can happen is that you argue about what really happened and what it really meant then and may mean now. I'm also pretty good at living in the future. I can "dream dreams" with the best of them, creating all sorts of scenarios where my best hopes and dreams come to fruition and those of my enemies crash and burn.

As Percy said, living in the present is like threading a needle. It requires us to deal with real people in real time, with real problems and real consequences of our actions.

Sometimes we in the church spend way too much time living in the past and the future and not enough time dealing with the present. We Lutherans are an historic and traditional church with due respect for our ancestors and the way things have always been done; but sometimes we fail to remember that as a denomination, we were born in rebellion. In our reverence for the past we often fail to realize that what worked yesterday is not necessarily what will work or is needed today.

Others of us are, in the old German proverb that Luther often employed, "ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater." In our desire to be ready for the future, we rush into whatever is predicted to be the next new thing, in everyday life and in the church.

Yes living in the past and the future is easy because you don't have to be accountable in real time for how it all turns out. But we live in the present, and the eternal now is a bit more difficult to navigate. It requires us to learn from the past without striving to recreate it and it calls us to prepare for the future while accepting that it seldom turns out like we or anyone else predicts.

Most of all, this present time threading of the needle living invites us to trust in the God who is the same "yesterday, today and tomorrow." Our calling is to carry forward the incredible Good News of the One who acted to save in the past, who is present with us now and who carries us into the future.

Delmer Chilton