Beginnings are exhilarating. We perk up with a fresh start to a new calendar year, new school year, a new class or hobby or home or friend. Better than starting, sometimes, is just looking forward to the turn of a new season or an upcoming event. Once that “new” season or occupation has begun, though, we quickly lose steam. Soon enough, new is normal and our enthusiasm wanes. Unfortunately, looking forward to something feels more preferable than living it.

Looking back is not nearly as appealing, yet most of us do it an awful lot. Much in our past, we would prefer to forget. We tend to be captive to our memories, sometimes replaying them and playing the “if only” or “what if” games on repeat.

Now is the hardest of all, living in the now, making most of today. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Maybe it’s because I am getting older and the years are spinning through faster and faster. My grandchildren are reaching ages I remember all too well as just a few weeks ago when their parents were my daily responsibility at those ages. Still, it is having the energy for today, considering today as important as tomorrow, that I want to try to encourage you about—now.

Oddly enough, part of the reason we have a hard time counting today seriously enough is because we don’t carry our lessons from previous days with us well. Certainly in this volatile cultural setting we are living in, no one remembers the wisdom one or other public person proposed six weeks ago–six months ago. It is as if nothing we learned last year, or five years ago (let alone five hundred!), matters a bit. Everything is always intensely about this very second, and if no one can fix things this very second, we’re devastated. Even if good things do happen today or new solutions are available, we forget by tomorrow and are on to fretting tomorrow, forgetting the hope we had yesterday. In this way, we are much like our toddlers. Everything is urgent, a right-now crisis, must be fixed now or our world falls apart. As adults, though, we can look backward and see that we have, one way or the other, pulled through most days when we thought life would surely end if something didn’t happen quick. History is irrelevant and easily forgotten. Could it be our error is failing to remember the past when we need it? Why do we need it? 

The truth is, we need the past. We need the future, too, but not to the exclusion of living in the now moments. And, truth is what we need to be grounded in. Truth is truth when it is rooted in reality. The past is real. We have real events to point to and have taken lessons from them we can bring forward with us into today’s challenges. I, like each of you, have had miseries, trials, sufferings, hardships of all kinds in my life. God has been faithful. I have never been abandoned. Many of them have benefitted me in many ways, others would have helped me more if I had allowed them to be instructive instead of fighting against the pain. Above all, over and over I have seen the hand of God bringing His purposes to pass in ways I could not have imagined when I was back there in the dark. His faithfulness is unquestionable. This can help me in what I face this day. To know what has been true in the past brings security and confidence in today’s unknowns.

It is that unknown component that disquiets us. The unknown about tomorrow, next month. It is different for each of us, but if we want to fret about a problem today, we can look forward and imagine the most disastrous possibilities will befall us. Or, because of the fear of what may lie ahead, we try to pretend the future won’t ever come. We wish we could know what’s ahead, but, on second thought, would rather not know. 

All this musing is my rambling way of getting around to teaching our children. We worry. I get it. I have worried enough for a hundred people over my kids in the 40 years I’ve been a parent. It hasn’t stopped now that they are gone. Some of us may not be addicted to drugs or devices, but we sure are addicted to worry. Worry is the most pointless, unproductive, unhealthy thing we can do today.

Because Jesus loved us, and knew absolutely how prone to be concerned for ourselves and those we care for we are, he said, over and over and over and over again: fear not. It wasn’t because He thought fearful things do not exist, He just knew we fear too much, and about the wrong things. “Do not worry about tomorrow.” He has had our back way back in the past, and He still does. In fact, he promised to be with us in that unknown future, too.

No matter how often we have (supposedly) learned this lesson, we continue to worry and fret, perhaps not as much for ourselves, but instead, we transfer our fretting to fears for our children, worrying and imagining all the horrors that are going to befall them if they can’t remember their reading vocabulary today, get those multiplication tables down, get this physics formula straight. They just don’t realize, we tell ourselves, what messes their future could be if they do not get these things right now. Next, because really our child is not getting these skills and this information well enough, we begin wondering if we made the wrong curriculum choices, and most fearful of all, worry about whether it is our teaching style or the interfering circumstances of life we can’t control that are the problem. Are we going about instructing the wrong way or are we too dense to see the thing that will help them? Oh my goodness, we could ruin this child’s future!

I wonder if it is possible to ruin our child’s future more with our fretting in the present. True, the future is rushing to meet us, but is it possible that how we handle this day at hand could make a difference in that future? Our impatience, or irritation, or anxiety could be hindering the learning that happens today, which certainly could bring our worst fears to reality. We forget we have a God who sees. We forget he rules the future as He did the past, and rules today. Since He knows and controls the future, doesn’t it make sense to look to him, instead of others, or worst of all, look within?

We worry about our child’s disobedience, but let’s start with ourselves. To worry is disobedient. Our good and gracious and powerful heavenly Father has said, “Fret not,” “Fear not.” Imagine if your child constantly, all day long, said, “I just can’t trust you…I worry you will ruin my life, Mom…I don’t think you love me enough to feed and clothe me…” Every time we worry, we are expressing these thoughts to God. We are not counting Him into our present, have forgotten His goodness in the past, and are not considering his knowledge of our future—or our child’s future.

Instead of worrying about the future, I have been working on focusing on it differently. The God who made us all and has ruled history always, knows what the plan is for tomorrow. If we face the future with confidence in Him, we can not only face it, but look forward to it. That ideal woman of every virtue described in Proverbs 31 “laughs at the time to come.” It’s not because she is so Mary Poppins “perfect in every way” that she has no worries, but because she fears the Lord. The fear of the Lord, after all, is the beginning of wisdom. We do not need math solutions today, behavior plans to fix our kids, we need to have a renewed fear of the Lord, who ruled the past, rules the future, and is asking us to live today, not fret in it. 

All this monumental rambling has been to make one point, beyond worrying about today or tomorrow: to live today with our hearts and eyes truly set on the future. Let us not just rush through today to get there. Let us not ruin today by worrying about the future. Let us work today, make as much progress today, as possible. If we do this every day, our children’s future will be secure. Their future does not hinge on the one horrible written narration we see today, the failed experiment, the out-of-tune song, the botched language lesson. What we need today is to remember that this person we are guiding has a future. We do not want it to be disappointing. Neither does their heavenly Father. This person at our table, on our nature walk is someone we couldn’t have imagined in existence twenty years ago, and cannot imagine twenty years hence. This person, of immense possibility, powers, and gifts, has an unknown future. 

Take a moment to imagine. How do you think Mary taught Jesus his manners, knowing he was the Messiah? How differently do you think George Washington’s mother would have spoken to him had she known his destiny? How differently would I have treated my children if I had known what beautiful, faithful people they would be as adults, what amazing things they would do, what marvelous blessings their children would be to me?

Miss Mason said, right on the first couple of pages of Home Education:

“Now, that work which is of most importance to society is the bringing up and instruction of the children––in the school, certainly, but far more in the home, because it is more than anything else the home influences brought to bear upon the child that determine the character and career of the future man or woman. It is a great thing to be a parent: there is no promotion, no dignity, to compare with it. The parents of but one child may be cherishing what shall prove a blessing to the world…it is the mothers who have the sole direction of the children’s early, most impressionable years. This is why we hear so frequently of great men who have had good mothers––that is, mothers who brought up their children themselves, and did not make over their gravest duty to indifferent persons.”

And you are not indifferent. And your children do have a future, which God willing, will benefit more people than you can dream of today. Let us, then, not waste today. The past is for our instruction, the future is for our hope, and today is for trust. Let’s teach these lessons to our children, let us learn them ourselves, because only God knows fully what His plan is for them. One thing we do know right now: you are part of His plan for them.

Jesus said, “Unless you become as one of these children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” To a child, every day is a whole new thing. Right now, let each one of their days be the beginning of their future.