What's Here Now?Sample

80 Years, 959 Months, 4171 weeks, 29,200 days, 700,800 hours, and 42,048,000 minutes.

This is the average lifespan of a person. There is some give and take. But if you live to be 80 years old, these are the numbers of your life. And I wonder how many years, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes are you really HERE? Awake. Alive. Inhaling and exhaling in this now moment. The HERE and NOW. It sounds simple—what’s so hard about being present? The problem is, most of us don’t know how to do it.

Most of us navigate through our lives on autopilot, unconsciously or habitually forming thoughts and judgments without knowing what we are doing, thinking, or feeling. We just kind of react our way through life. Our bodies are here, but emotionally, spiritually, and relationally we’re not really here. In not being present, we become disconnected from what is happening in our lives—disconnected from our own bodies, hearts, and minds—living in WHAT WAS or the WHAT IF’S, we forget how to be here in WHAT IS.

The reality is that every pain point, tension, and disconnection in our work, relationships, and lives stems from not being present.

• When your thoughts race at night.
• When you find yourself avoiding situations where something could go wrong.
• When you find yourself repeating the same fight with your partner over and over again.
• When you find yourself thinking that one day your life will be better than it is now.
• When you fix that problem, lose that weight, get that job, have that relationship.
• When you numb out with any kind of addiction to not face what’s going on in your present.
• When you avoid your inbox or text messages because they have piled up to the point that feels unmanageable.
• When you replay a conversation that already happened over and over again.

All of these challenges are connected to not being present, and it’s not how God created us to live. You will never experience the PEACE of God if you don’t dwell in the PRESENT with God.Psalm 46:1 says God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. God is ever-present. That’s as present as it gets. While God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, the only place to experience the presence of God—the ever-present help of God—is in the present with God. I love how Father Richard Rohr says, “We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.” The present is God’s zip code, and it’s the place God wants us to live. God is NEVER not present; we are the ones missing from the present.