What happens when we are here and now, for God?
Third, when you are present to God you will live with freedom.
How many of us journey well into adulthood wrestling with a desire to be loved and accepted? Free to live courageously into the people we were born to be? Secure in our gifts? At peace?
All of us, I suspect. We are waiting for someone to give us permission, someone to love us, someone to say I honor you, adore you, love you.
When that doesn’t happen, we often assume that it doesn’t because somehow God refuses to do it. As real as that conviction may seem, however, nothing could be further from truth.
God loves us in order to give life back to us. If we miss that gift, if we give ourselves to obsessions that rob us of life in the present — it won’t be because God did not want to give us life. It will because we were not alive enough to God in the present to receive what God wanted to give us.
I often find myself imagining the number of times we have stood before Jesus with our hands too full to receive life, protesting, “But Lord, I have my bitterness, my anger, my shame, my fear, my guilt. I don’t have hands that are free enough to receive the gift of new life.” And Jesus, responds, “Put them down. Put down the ugly, limiting, death-dealing emotions and future expecations that trap you and own you — and open your hands.”
You may feel that there is too much history for you to be free of the past. You may say that the future is too complicated and scary for you to live with freedom in the present. But the truth is, if it is God whose reading of our lives finally matters, then there is never so much history that we cannot turn to God, the future is never so complicated that we cannot be present to God. The cold cases, the barns, the woulda-coulda-shoulda do not need to pronounce a verdict on our lives. All we need to say is…
“I am here, I am yours, my hands are free.”