Volume 7, Issue 3, January 1998

HAPPINESS HAS TO BE FOUND IN THE PRESENT

There was a gasoline station in Australia with the sign, "Free Petrol Tomorrow." Nobody ever got free gas because tomorrow never comes.

We now face a new year and many will make resolutions and put forth aspirations for the coming days. Tomorrow I will do this or that, we say. This is putting off the step and tomorrow may never come.

The tiny word "now" means the present time or moment. It may look innocent and simple, but in it mystery is packed; the mystery of time. And time always reminds us not to postpone living, not to defer important decisions by fantasizing on tomorrow's shadowy possibilities.

A card-playing acquaintance told me one day that if he could live his life over again he would have played the ace of spades differently yesterday. Most of us would do many things differently if we could live our lives over again. But New Years reminds us of the opportunity to begin again, to seize what is now, and to go forward.

The English poet Cowley wrote: "Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, But an eternal now does ever does ever last." In the midst of time, in the now, we experience eternity. Eternal life, life with depth and all other dimensions and qualities that deserve to carry on forever is found in the now.

St. Paul was able to declare through his religious experience, "...my present life is not that of the old 'I', but the living Christ within me." And St. John proclaimed in his First Letter of John: "Here and now, my dear friends, we are God's children. We don't know what we shall become in the future."

You and I are here to fulfill -fill full - our lives. We will live now as befitting children of God.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.