Today - Heritage Hope and Love

If I could encourage you right now with one thing, that would be not to worry and enjoy today. I believe Grandma wanted to remind her readers of that important fact with this poem.

Today
I cannot change the past
But I can waste the present
By worrying about troubles
The future may not bring –
I have no yesterdays
Time took them away
Tomorrow may not be –
But I have today!

~Author Unknown

Why Do We Worry?

Did you know experts tell us that 95% of everything that we worry about never comes to pass? This statistic really has me thinking. We can spend so much time and energy wasting the present worrying about so many things that will never come to pass. I tend to be someone who worries. And when I think back over my life and all the things that I have worried about, the experts are right, most of those things never came to fruition. I can think of specific situations where…

I lost sleep, gave myself a headache, sat around with a pit in my stomach, and on and on and on…..

and when the situation played out, I had wasted so much time worrying about something that, in the end, didn’t even matter. God even commands us to not spend time worrying about the future.

The Bible tells us in Matthew 6:25-27 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?”

Today – God Loves the Birds

When I start to worry, I try to remind myself of this verse. I think about the birds and ask myself if God loves them, how much more does he love me? My parents have a few little birds that come to sleep in their window ledge almost every night. What a safe place, they have shelter and are kept safe (I’ve never saw anything up high in my parent’s porch that looks scary). How much does God love those little birds that he gave them such a nice place to rest every evening! And I also try to look back over situations in my life and remind myself of how God brought me through, or helped guide me to avoid a troublesome situation. God really is loving and faithful and always provides safe places.

Today – God Loves Me

I can recall an example of God’s faithfulness at a time when I was running low on money. In college, I only worked during the summer and funds were starting to get very tight by the end of the school year. I would go to the bank every week or two and take out just enough to pay for bills, groceries, and gas. I was trying to do my part and not spend money on frivolous items, but I would look at my bank statement and my money was low. So low, I was really worried I would run out by the end of the semester. However, the next time I went to the bank to withdraw money, unbelievably the slip seemed to read of a balance similar to the time before.

Today – God Loves Elijah’s Widow

This went on for a few months. I started feeling like the woman who fed Elijah the bread and in return she never ran out of flour (1 Kings 17:7-24)! During a famine, every time she made bread and poured flour from the jar, she always had just enough to survive – that’s what it seemed like with my bank account! I’m not sure if God was putting extra money in my bank account, or if I always had a poor memory of how much money was really in my account, but I never ran out and had just enough to get me through until my summer job started again. What a blessing! God is always faithful to us and will never leave us with unattended need. If we are not careful, we will forget to notice or thank God for his faithfulness.

Today – God is Building Our Faith

My college experience is a good example of how important it is to not spend time worrying about the future and situations that are out of our control. We do need to use wisdom and try our best to follow God’s commands and then we need to simply trust Him for everything that we have no control over. I will be the first to tell you that this is easier said than done. But the more that we can rely upon God and his word, the more faith that we build and the easier trusting Him becomes.

Today – God Loves Us in Spite of Our Past

On the other end of the spectrum, it is sometimes easy to get stuck and worry over the past. We all have times in our lives that we could look back on with regret. But let’s face it there is nothing we can do about the past. There is no way we can go back and change it or do things differently. What’s done is done. What we CAN do to fix the past is ask for forgiveness from people (if that is impossible, you can write a letter to the person, even if it is not possible to actually give it to him or her). Writing out our feelings can be very healing. And maybe even more importantly, we can ask God for forgiveness.

All we can do with our past is learn from our mistakes and try to do better today. I believe as we travel through this life we best glorify the Lord by growing closer to Jesus each day He gives us. It does us no good to rehash a situation in our minds over and over again. This will more than likely do one of two things: make us feel bad about ourselves, or make us bitter towards God or other people. Trapping ourselves in a regretful past doesn’t help us, we need to forgive (ourselves and/or others) and focus on today.

God is with Us Today!

As the poem states, we really do need to concentrate our efforts on living for today and more importantly God’s word instructs to not worry about anything, past or future. Of course God instructs us to plan and use wisdom, but once we have done our part we trust God with the rest. If we are not careful we will use our gift of today wasted on worrying about the past or the future. Today is what God has given us and that’s where God wants us to enjoy. He knows ultimately, that is where we will be most happy and do the most good for ourselves and for everyone else. With God’s grace and help let us try and be our best TODAY.