Living in the Moment

Recently a life coach challenged me to begin learning how to live in the moment and to see God in those moments.  That challenge led me to reading the following book and to consider living the reflective life in the moment.  How many times since my husband went to heaven have I been unable to see the gifts of the present moments in my life?  I’m realizing that I don’t want life to just pass me by without my seeing what God is doing in my life through those that He puts into my life every day.  Not only that, but I want to truly desire to embrace those gifts and reap the blessings of those sacred moments from Him.

Excerpt from Seeing What is Sacred by Ken Gire:

The reflective life is a life that is attentive, receptive, and responsive to what God is doing in us and around us.  It’s a life that asks God to reach into our heart, allowing Him to touch us there, regardless of the pleasure it excites or the pain it inflicts.  It’s a life that reaches back, straining to touch the hem of Christ’s garment, allowing Him to turn and call us out of the crowd, regardless of how humiliating it is to stand before Him or how uncertain we are as to what He will say.

Regardless of the uncertainty, we can be certain of this: the words He speaks are words of life.  That is why we must reach for them, receive them, and respond to them.  Whatever they may say, however they may sound, whatever implications they may have for our lives, the words that proceed from His mouth offer life to our souls.

Those words are how our relationship with God grows.

Living reflectively is how we receive them.

The life we have been given can’t be bought or bargained for.  It is a gift.  Every good and perfect gift comes from above, James tells us, coming down from the Father of lights in whom there is no variation or shifting shadow (James 1:17).  If our day is indeed a gift from God, something of the Giver should be evident within that gift.

Abraham Heschel said, “There is a unique kind of transparence about things and events.  The world is seen through, and no veil can conceal God completely.  So the pious man is ever alert to see behind the appearance of things a trace of the divine, and thus his attitude toward life is one of expectant reverence.”

It is a great loss that we awake to so many gifts on a given day, not only without opening them, but without knowing they are even there for us to open.  When each of us awakes, it should be with a splash-of-cold-water-in-the-face awareness that it has been given me another day to live.  To me.  To others that gift has been withheld.  The sun rises, but their eyes will forever be closed to its light, its beauty, its blessings.  But to me another day, for whatever reason, has been given.  Another day to give gifts and to receive them.  To love and be loved.  To embrace God through the moments of my day, and through those moments to be embraced by Him.

Each new morning that God’s mercies dawn on us with the gift of another day, we should greet that day with an attitude of expectant reverence, as one kneeling to receive the sacrament of some holy communion, for truly, it is.