This Day
The Prayer says "Give us this day our daily bread. . . ." So again we are reminded to focus on the now. We can also take a chunk of the passage out of context: "Give us this day. . . ." I like the quote this way because it changes the object of the verb without (in my mind) changing the true meaning of the passage. We are still focusing on this day; better, we are moved beyond the material things we ask for, the bread, and seem to be asking for the day. We are petitioning God for a day--for time and for all the possibilities each day holds.
When I was around junior-high age, I had a patch on a pair of blue jeans: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Ersatz hippy child that I might have been, I did not truly grasp the meaning of that iron-on mantra. It was cool, and that was enough for me at the time. Yet now, I begin to see capital-T truth hidden in those words: each day is a new beginning, each day is a chance to start fresh, a chance to take control of our lives--yet we rarely do so, perhaps because we do not know how.
Most of us claim we want to achieve this kind of new beginning: we make plans, we make lists, we vow and pledge and promise; but, we never get around to doing anything because we do not know exactly what it is we have to do. To take control of our lives, as Christians, we have to surrender our lives. Seize the day, then, is not about grabbing hold; it is about letting go. This is counter-intuitive to our way of thinking. There is a Zen-ness to the path we are to choose, a less-is-more way of approaching life that is alien to our culture.
If we truly wish for God to give us this day, we must realize that we are submitting to God and that this day is His day. For many of us, the point of having the day is to do with it as we wish. We want the day for furthering our agenda: we want to achieve success in our job, we want a good day with our family, we want to catch our limit of small-mouth bass, we want our garden to grow, we want to take a nap. None of these things are bad, of course, but we always seem to want to jump straight to what we want. We have to understand that the day is God's, and only through Him can we find what we desire--and often that thing is outside our scope. If we turn the day over to God, if we acknowledge that it is His, then we often discover things that we did not know we wanted. (Not unlike a small child who opens a birthday gift and exclaims, "It's just what I always wanted and I never even knew it!")
When we ask for the day, we need to grasp, not the day itself, but its potential. God blesses us with each day, and if we submit the day--and by extension, ourselves--to God, we will be amazed at the things that will happen.
I am not suggesting that God is somehow trying to trick us, or even that this is some kind of cosmic test, that by not giving the day back to God we fail and do not pass Go, do not collect $200. That kind of thinking trivializes God and His blessings. What I am suggesting is that our day becomes enriched when we offer it back to God. The blessings of the Holy Spirit infuse our days when we recognize that they are, after all, not ours. And the wondrous thing is that all those things we wanted in the first place can still be ours: we can be successful at our jobs, we can have good times with our families, we can do those things we had wanted to do. But now we are able to put them into perspective, now they have focus.
Okay, so we do, indeed, seize the day. What do we do with it? Ask ten people at random, "If you had a day, what would you do with it?" I have no idea what kind of answers you might get--it all depends on whom you ask. I know some people who would love a day to try to get caught up--on work, on little jobs around the house, on laundry, on gossip, on watching everything stuffed in the DVR. Others would want a day to spend on a hobby--scrapbooking, gardening, cooking, fishing, eating. Some might want a day to devote to prayer, others might enjoy a full day of doing absolutely nothing. We are all different, and we all have different wants, needs, and desires.
But what might be more interesting would be to ask people, after they have had a "free" day, "How did you spend it?" I am fairly certain that many of us would express some degree of regret about what we did with our day: "I wasted the whole day running endless errands." "I veged out in front of the tv and ate junk food all day." "I had every intention of getting something done, but it never happened." Not every person will feel this way, but it happens often enough to be noted. I believe this regret stems from our sense of missing something: we are aware, on some level, that something is amiss, that something we need is not where it should be. We are missing God's presence--not that He is not there but that we have not invited Him into our life by acknowledging that the day is His. God is, as we have explored earlier, always there (no matter where there is); however, God has given us the ability to accept or reject Him--and ignoring Him is a kind of rejection.
When we invite God into our life by acknowledging Him, by giving Him the day, we might end up doing exactly the same kind of thing as we would have done anyway--we might vege out in front of the television or take a nap or never get around to the one thing we had planned to do. Then again, if we put our day into focus through God, we are more likely to do something productive with the day--but even if we do not manage to do that, we will not experience the regret of having wasted the day as we other might have done. We should be able to see how our day fits into God's day: rest is not a bad thing, is a very necessary thing, and sometimes we have to take time out just to maintain our sanity (or something like it). By giving the day to God, by allowing Him to guide our decisions, we surrender the need to feel guilty and we are better able to put everything into perspective.
God rewards us for allowing Him to have His day, and ultimately we receive just what we originally asked for: Give us this day.
When I was around junior-high age, I had a patch on a pair of blue jeans: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Ersatz hippy child that I might have been, I did not truly grasp the meaning of that iron-on mantra. It was cool, and that was enough for me at the time. Yet now, I begin to see capital-T truth hidden in those words: each day is a new beginning, each day is a chance to start fresh, a chance to take control of our lives--yet we rarely do so, perhaps because we do not know how.
Most of us claim we want to achieve this kind of new beginning: we make plans, we make lists, we vow and pledge and promise; but, we never get around to doing anything because we do not know exactly what it is we have to do. To take control of our lives, as Christians, we have to surrender our lives. Seize the day, then, is not about grabbing hold; it is about letting go. This is counter-intuitive to our way of thinking. There is a Zen-ness to the path we are to choose, a less-is-more way of approaching life that is alien to our culture.
If we truly wish for God to give us this day, we must realize that we are submitting to God and that this day is His day. For many of us, the point of having the day is to do with it as we wish. We want the day for furthering our agenda: we want to achieve success in our job, we want a good day with our family, we want to catch our limit of small-mouth bass, we want our garden to grow, we want to take a nap. None of these things are bad, of course, but we always seem to want to jump straight to what we want. We have to understand that the day is God's, and only through Him can we find what we desire--and often that thing is outside our scope. If we turn the day over to God, if we acknowledge that it is His, then we often discover things that we did not know we wanted. (Not unlike a small child who opens a birthday gift and exclaims, "It's just what I always wanted and I never even knew it!")
When we ask for the day, we need to grasp, not the day itself, but its potential. God blesses us with each day, and if we submit the day--and by extension, ourselves--to God, we will be amazed at the things that will happen.
I am not suggesting that God is somehow trying to trick us, or even that this is some kind of cosmic test, that by not giving the day back to God we fail and do not pass Go, do not collect $200. That kind of thinking trivializes God and His blessings. What I am suggesting is that our day becomes enriched when we offer it back to God. The blessings of the Holy Spirit infuse our days when we recognize that they are, after all, not ours. And the wondrous thing is that all those things we wanted in the first place can still be ours: we can be successful at our jobs, we can have good times with our families, we can do those things we had wanted to do. But now we are able to put them into perspective, now they have focus.
Okay, so we do, indeed, seize the day. What do we do with it? Ask ten people at random, "If you had a day, what would you do with it?" I have no idea what kind of answers you might get--it all depends on whom you ask. I know some people who would love a day to try to get caught up--on work, on little jobs around the house, on laundry, on gossip, on watching everything stuffed in the DVR. Others would want a day to spend on a hobby--scrapbooking, gardening, cooking, fishing, eating. Some might want a day to devote to prayer, others might enjoy a full day of doing absolutely nothing. We are all different, and we all have different wants, needs, and desires.
But what might be more interesting would be to ask people, after they have had a "free" day, "How did you spend it?" I am fairly certain that many of us would express some degree of regret about what we did with our day: "I wasted the whole day running endless errands." "I veged out in front of the tv and ate junk food all day." "I had every intention of getting something done, but it never happened." Not every person will feel this way, but it happens often enough to be noted. I believe this regret stems from our sense of missing something: we are aware, on some level, that something is amiss, that something we need is not where it should be. We are missing God's presence--not that He is not there but that we have not invited Him into our life by acknowledging that the day is His. God is, as we have explored earlier, always there (no matter where there is); however, God has given us the ability to accept or reject Him--and ignoring Him is a kind of rejection.
When we invite God into our life by acknowledging Him, by giving Him the day, we might end up doing exactly the same kind of thing as we would have done anyway--we might vege out in front of the television or take a nap or never get around to the one thing we had planned to do. Then again, if we put our day into focus through God, we are more likely to do something productive with the day--but even if we do not manage to do that, we will not experience the regret of having wasted the day as we other might have done. We should be able to see how our day fits into God's day: rest is not a bad thing, is a very necessary thing, and sometimes we have to take time out just to maintain our sanity (or something like it). By giving the day to God, by allowing Him to guide our decisions, we surrender the need to feel guilty and we are better able to put everything into perspective.
God rewards us for allowing Him to have His day, and ultimately we receive just what we originally asked for: Give us this day.
posted by Rodney Rhodus | 10:08 AM
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