Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.
Matthew 6:34
Today, by the grace of God, I mark 28 years of service as an Orthodox Priest. I was ordained to the Holy Priesthood on May 15, 1998, which coincidently was a Friday that year. One of the most fulfilling and enriching aspects of priestly ministry has been the Prayer Team these past 11 years. I thank you for your encouragement and your prayers. I also ask for your forgiveness. I make many mistakes, including with the Prayer Team. Thank you for being an important part of my ministry, and my life. I thank God for these 28 years of priestly ministry, and for His mercy to continue on, despite my sinfulness in the many times I have fallen short of what it means to be a priest.
Several years ago, I was celebrating the Divine Liturgy on a weekday, so I was committed to being in the church from roughly 8:45 a.m.-11:15 a.m. including Orthros, Divine Liturgy, and the things that happen before and after. I have a lot of things on my task list for the day, and I was anxious to get into the office to start working on them. The entire Divine Liturgy, I mechanically did all the rubrics without much thought at all. My mind was on the things I needed to do after the service was over. By the time the Liturgy finished, I sadly realized that I had truly wasted my morning. My body had been in the church while my mind had been in the office. I hadn’t gotten any of my work done and I hadn’t worshipped either. I had spent 2.5 hours in the church and had nothing to show for my time. Because I was living in the future (what I was going to do in the afternoon), I had totally missed out of the present, the opportunity to worship God.
We all get like this at times. We have anxiety about the future, or regret about the past, and it causes us to miss out on the present. Yes, we not only have eyes that fixate on the future. We also sometimes have eyes that are stuck in the past.
The remedy for this is to focus on being present. We cannot go back in time. And we are not guaranteed the future. What we have is the present. The past is addressed through repentance and improvement. We improve on mistakes, we repent for sins, we ask for forgiveness from people we’ve wronged. There are some things that we won’t be able to fix, so we learn lessons from failures. And then we move on. If we can’t move on, then we become stuck in the past, which makes us unable to focus on the present, which then spills over and creates future failures.
Anxiety about the far future also seems pointless, yet we all do it. I think sometimes about retirement, and then remind myself “that is far into the future, will I even live to see retirement?” That doesn’t mean not saving for retirement, it just means not obsessing over it. Then there is anxiety about the near future, something coming up next week, or even something coming up this afternoon. Many students worry about exams. The remedy for that is to study in the present in order to be ready for the future exam, and if one has done a good job studying in the present, they will be ready for the future. If one is worrying in the present about the future, they won’t get anything done in the present other than worrying which will make the future worry come to pass.
Many times, we commit to doing something in the present, like worshipping, or going to your kid’s ballgame, or going out with friends, and we are so anxious about something happening later that we don’t enjoy the present moment, or we aren’t productive in the present moment. I realized that day at the Divine Liturgy, that by committing to having my body in church conducting worship, I was committing to not being able to work on anything in the office that morning. Therefore, during the commitment worship, there should not have been anxiety about the office work which I couldn’t possibly be doing. If you are at a ball game with your child, enjoy the ball game. The work will be there when the ball game is over. Of course, there is the temptation to work while watching the ballgame. Often when we multi-task, we don’t get any of the tasks done well.
We know that Jesus taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our neighbor is the person closest to us at any given moment. That might be the person in the pew next to us at church, or in the next office at work, or in the next lane on the road. To love our neighbor means to care for the person who is right next to us at a given moment.
To be present means to live in the exact moment you are in. Thus, if we are talking to someone, that becomes the one and only concern we have at that given moment. There might be many concerns in our life on a given day, but ideally there is only one concern at a given moment. Jesus’ instruction not to be anxious about tomorrow also means to not be anxious for this afternoon, or an hour from now, but focus on the task at hand, on the moment at hand. Let the day’s (or the hour’s or the minute’s) own trouble be sufficient for the moment.
Many times, I share personal stories because I want you to know that I may be a priest but I struggle with the same things everyone else struggles with. One year at summer camp, there was an emergency in the middle of the night, and I only slept two hours. It was the night before we heard confessions all day. So, I had twenty people signed up to go to confession with me, and I was really tired. And I thought to myself “I have no idea how I’m going to get through twenty confessions when I can barely keep my eyes open.” The solution was to get through twenty confessions “one confession at a time.” I stopped looking at how I was going to manage the whole day and just started thinking how to manage each appointment of the day, one at a time. My anxiety eased, the day passed. There is a saying “How do you eat an elephant?” One bite at a time.” When we face challenges we think are impossible, they are managed one moment at a time, one event at a time, even one minute at a time.
One other thought and this concerns present failures. We have moments when something doesn’t go right and it upsets us, even rightfully so. In times where things fall short of expectations, it is important to ask ourselves “is this going to matter in a day, a week, a month or a year?” and if it is not really going to matter (i.e. is it going to matter that this beach day got rained out a year from now), then we should temper our anxiety and keep things in a more proper perspective.
If we have one eye on the past and one eye on the future, we have no eyes on the present. We cannot change the past, the future is not a guarantee, which is why it is important to keep our eyes on the present.
To Thee I lift up my eyes, o Thou who art enthroned in the heavens! Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their Master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till He have mercy on us. Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt. Too long our soul has been sated with the scorn of those who are at ease, the contempt of the proud. Psalm 123
Points to ponder: What things are you most anxious about—things in the near future, the far future, or things in the past? Do you have your eyes more on the past, present or future? What causes you to struggle with being present?
