Present-Focused Living

Do you ever find it hard to live presently in one season, while also planning for another?

The week before Christmas, I received an email from a publication company about their lineup of Lenten resources for congregations. My first response to this email was: “Lent already? But Jesus isn’t born yet!” However, Ash Wednesday was less than two months away when that email arrived, and people need time to make decisions about Lent offerings. I even needed time to plan. I made decisions about what Lenten devotions to offer families before I left the office for Christmas break.

In mid-January, I attended a youth ministry conference in New Orleans. The trip also included a lot of planning for and scouting out the city in advance of taking teenagers there for our denomination’s triennial youth gathering… which is in late July.

At the time I write this, we’re only halfway through Lent, yet I’m already thinking about what our congregation’s programs for young people will look like in the fall. In the next couple of weeks, I’ll start volunteer recruiting for both our summer Vacation Bible School, as well as for the next school year.

As someone who is responsible for planning and implementing faith formation programming in a congregation, I’m always looking ahead. A tension exists when you’re trying to be present in one season while simultaneously planning for another. For me, this tension is sometimes very jarring. As someone who wants to live in and savor the moment, it can be hard to focus on the present when I also must plan ahead.

Perhaps you feel this tension, too. Even if your job doesn’t require planning ahead, your life probably does. Whether it’s planning a future vacation or making decisions about new Christmas decorations, we all have future planning to do. I especially notice the tension in the lives of youth and young adults as they often make decisions about future education, jobs, or personal lives far in advance of a transition happening. It’s especially evident during the spring months, when we enter a time filled with school changes, graduations, and shifting into new seasons of life.

How do we help people live in the present, even when we live in a culture that is so future-focused? How do we ourselves live in the present, even when we have to also look ahead? I can’t say that I have the answers to this question, as I’m still figuring it out myself. However, I can share a few practices that help me personally.

First, I find that keeping a regular rhythm of journaling helps me focus on what I’m learning and experiencing on a consistent basis. The journal I use the most and adore is Emily P. Freeman’s The Next Right Thing Guided Journal, which is written to guide people through weekly, monthly, and seasonal points of reflection. Once a week (usually on Saturday mornings) I sit down with my journal and write about my week using this prompt: “These are the days….” The prompt is open-ended so you can answer it however you wish, but I usually create a list of words, phrases, or short sentences that describe what I felt, learned, and experienced during the week. Grounding myself in this regular practice not only helps me create a rhythm of writing about the present, but it also helps me pay more attention to what I’m experiencing as I move throughout each week.

Listening to seasonal music is another way in which I try to focus on the present. I especially find playlists of music for liturgical seasons to be very helpful for grounding myself in the tone of a specific season. There are many public playlists out there; doing a simple search in your music app (I use Spotify) will give you options from which you can pick. I particularly enjoy listening to the different liturgical season playlists on Spotify that were created by Sacred Ordinary Days. Recently, I’ve also picked up creating playlists to share with our congregation; here’s a link to the Lent playlist I created.

Finally, one practice that I’ve found helpful for young children is following a liturgical calendar throughout the year. We use Illustrated Ministry’s liturgical calendar, and at the start of our Sunday morning formation time, a kid colors in that Sunday’s date with the color of the liturgical season. This opening ritual helps us ground our learning time in that day and liturgical season. It’s become a fun little way for us to start our gathering time.

The practices I list above are not an exhaustive list—perhaps there’s something else you do that helps you ground yourself in the current season. Perhaps there’s another ritual, ceremony, or tradition that you can do with the young people in your life, too. I think we’ll always feel the tension that comes from trying to live in the present, while also having to think ahead. May we be people who find ways to ground ourselves in the present while living in a future-focused world.