Future Sitting

My family is in Idaho this week while my wife interviews for jobs in the area. As I write this I am sitting in my favorite Boise coffee shop feeling an acute awareness of a future rapidly approaching. For years my wife and I have been working to finish our educations and training for the sake of a future in this northwestern city. In recent years, I have sat in this coffee shop every opportunity I got when visiting my wife’s family. I fell in love with this city the first time I sat in this shop. And now, as our moving here is ever closer, I cannot help but be a bit overwhelmed by the journey traveled. It’s easy to overlook just how beautiful a thing it is to walk down a path lined with “everyday” provisions and graces.

In light of all the many potholes, mistakes, pains, and dark nights; it’s no small thing to have a chance at landing in a place that feels so utterly like home. In fact, most of the time we spend breathing is in search of such a place. It’s a place of warmth and rest more than it is a physical place like a city or house. This search is difficult for many reasons, but one reason seems clearest to me as I sit my favorite coffee shop. The search for a place that feels like home is most difficult because we always seem to be trying to get away from the place we are. It’s true that most of us think about ourselves more than we should, but most of that time is spent brooding over our past or “wander lusting” for a future. All the time we spend in our past and future keeps us from seeing how much “home” can be found when we live in the present. In the book Sensing Jesus, Zach Eswine describes this as living “locally” inside the life we actually have instead of the life we long for. This idea has been said in so many ways for so long that there’s nothing novel about it however, it is anything but common in our culture.

Because of all this, “home” (i.e. rest and peace) is always somewhere other than we are. “Today” turns into a perpetual holding pattern away from hope. Equally worse, we doom the future to be a disappointment because are hoping it can deliver something it is not designed to do. In all of this we blind ourselves to the amazing relationships and events filling our “todays”. There is something profoundly tragic and exhausting about not being present in your own life.