“Live for Today” sounds like a call to hedonism (“eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die”). It is actually a call to faith. I came across the following paragraph among my devotional reading that reminds us that we are called to be fully present in the “now.” The excerpt comes from How to Make It Through the Day by John Carmody.
The only time that is fully real is the present. Yesterday is old news and tomorrow is full of maybes. This is obvious enough, when one reflects on it, but it takes most of us many years to realize its full implications. So most of us spend a great deal of our time daydreaming about the past or worrying about the future. Not realizing the value of the real bird we have in hand, we leave the present to go rooting in the past or future bushes. As a result, the personal business that should stand highest on our agenda often never gets done. What is this personal business? Finding peace of mind, and so happiness, right here and now. Learning to live so that we savor each day, waste none of the precious moments God has given us.
I realize that I sometimes want to retreat to the past, or skip ahead to future in order to avoid difficult experiences in the present. Christ calls us, however, to be fully in the present . . . otherwise, we will miss the blessings that God has placed in our path. It’s like conducting an Easter Egg Hunt with the eggs lying around us in full view. If we focus our sights on an object in the distance and walk directly to it, we can walk right by the eggs that are situated close by, never seeing them. Jesus invites us to “live for today.”
Reminds me of a statement I saw at Starbuch’s (even they can have eye opening thoughts as well as coffee) What is the purpose of life … to have a life of purpose!
Today… I will live a life of purpose as a Christian to the best of my ability!