“This is the day the Lord has made;
We will rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 118:24
Today as I awoke, I was prompted by the Holy Spirit in a particular area and direction of my life. Today is Boxing Day as you are all aware, the day after ‘The Big Day’ for many people. An enormous amount of time, effort and money goes into that one day in attempts to bring things together. In love and goodwill, peace offerings of all sizes, sharing and displaying of affection. Around the corner is New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, across the world people celebrate the ringing out of the old and the bringing in of the new. For many now this celebration is marked by enormous firework extravaganzas. Complete strangers congregating in central key areas like Big Ben in London and Times square in New York. Thousands of people melting in the euphoria of freedom and love at the simple passing of a specific time.
But what of today? The Holy Spirit showed me this morning quite clearly in a vision of driving of how I need to not dwell. How better to focus and not look too far into what is coming up.
Being here in France at my friend’s house is wonderful. It’s so quiet and peaceful, but I have been reflective too intently at times. I have hundreds of study books and scores of notebooks that have been filled with all types of notes and scrawling’s from sermons and studies that I have attended. I am allowing some of them to attract too much of my attention, a bit like when I am driving.
The Holy Spirit showed me that if I dwell on my rear view mirror, how can I know where I am going. I am blinded by my own choice! I have a rear view camera for my mirror as the vehicle is long and you couldn’t possibly see through a mirror. The Spirit showed me that I could turn the device OFF and doesn’t affect the direction of where I am or where I am going! No, I was to not avert my eyes completely, but give the past only momentary glances lest my view becomes impeded.
Then I was shown the point through the windscreen where I am trying to focus while continuing in a forward direction. In that, I am paying a little bit too much attention to what is around the corner instead of keeping my eyes on the road in front where I am now.
Again the Spirit showed me like on a Sat Nav system, where you can see not just what is ahead but you can see the shape of the road ahead. It gives you not a view ahead but an idea of what is to come. Now this may be well and good in the interests of safety to know what is the shape of things to come, but its taking another amount of focus from now, the present, what is happening on the road now away. And in a way that is what I am doing. There is a focus beginning to grow where I am anticipating some of what will be happening in the New Year. I am pre-empting some things, but that leaves me out of focus for now. What is happening now, what opportunities are here now. No, I was to refocus back, stop trying to look around the corner and focus on this moment, this minute, this hour and this day!
I wonder how many opportunities that I have missed completely to sow a seed or water a seed that has already been planted because I have been looking too far back or too far forward. Not looking at now, this minute?
I spoke yesterday with a good friend about a particular quote from the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Haccus, more commonly known as Horace. He is remembered for his famous ‘Carpe Diem,’ quote, ‘Sieze the Day’. Well he was quite right, though that is not in the carnal, fleshly sense of just doing whatever, but in the sense of living in the moment instead of the past or the present, the Bible tells me in Proverbs 27:1;
“Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.”
But in the living of today, may we all seize this time, this moment, this day, to be light bearers. Let the light of Jesus shine through us as a bright beacon of hope today and this day forward, but today first.
God Bless