Living in the "not yet"

My son, Max, is in this stage now where there are two times when things are happening for him: right now, and “not yet.” If something is happening tomorrow or next week and you ask him about it, he’ll say, “not yet.” It can be pretty cute. It can also be annoying.

But it got me thinking. What if we all lived our lives that way? Something is either happening right now to us. Or it’s “not yet” happening, so we don’t have to worry about it yet. Maybe we wouldn’t worry so much about the future if we looked at it as the “not yet.” Instead we spend so much time worrying about what will happen tomorrow, when there is no way we can ever know what will happen and nothing we could do about it if we did.

Maybe we would sleep easier at night if all we were thinking about was sleeping that night and figuring tomorrow out tomorrow. I think there’s somewhere in the Bible that says to let tomorrow worry about itself.

So maybe we should learn to live a little bit more like a little kid and take the things that are happening now and deal with them. Then when the “not yet” things get here, you can deal with those. I’m not saying this is easy. I’m not even saying that it’s truly possible. Look at me right now. I’m up in the middle of the night because I couldn’t get this idea out of my head, and I was worried that if I went to sleep, I would forget it in the morning. So, here I am writing once again in the middle of the night, when I really should be sleeping because we’ve got a lot of things planned for tomorrow. Oh well. There’s another thing to worry about. Hope I can get some sleep now. And stay awake during all the events tomorrow.

I look forward to the “not yet” when I don’t have so much to worry about. Man will I have a lot of sleeping to catch up on whenever that glorious “not yet” gets here.