How special and precious is the present moment! It’s really all we’ve got, but do we appreciate it, and do we inhabit it as we should?
The past, as memory, intrudes into the present moment,
With all its coded and distorted and fragmented aspect.
The future, as mystery, perturbs the present moment,
With all its ambitions, hopes and fears jostling together.
The past and future only exist in the present moment.
They flicker fast or slow depending on our moods.
All I am and all I have resides in the present moment.
This present moment may not be the sum of past moments,
But nonetheless it is hugely coloured by them,
And the past is not to be escaped, but to be redeemed.
I can only touch God in the grace of the present moment.
God, for His part, not only sustains this present moment,
But He assures an endless succession of moments for me.
He holds all my moments, and they are all present to Him.
Because my past is present to Him, it is fully redeemable.
And with God, each moment is a new beginning for me:
His mercy is applied in it; His peace only has value in it.
I am – immortal – from the moment He loved me into being,
And my death itself is but a single moment yet to come,
To be then followed by an eternity of other moments.
What those other moments will hold is quite another matter.
That will surely depend on my choices now for love or for hate.
As all humanity is perched on the crust of our little planet,
So too, my existence is perched on the rim of this moment.
Each present moment is transitory, and yet totally secure:
It is secure precisely because it is the here and now.
As such it is all too easy to take this moment for granted;
To mourn the past, and to fret for the future, but –
Blink, and this moment is gone, never to be relived.
To celebrate the present moment is to breathe deeply,
And to chance to be in touch with the core of my being.
All God’s priceless blessings are bestowed through it.
To be fully alive in the present moment is to lose fear;
Fear of what the past has done, and what the future might be.
The present moment possesses us – can we possess it?