When You Don’t Know What the Future Holds

As I’m balancing my bag down through the plane aisle, I overhear a spectacled woman, with her own glorious halo of white hair, seated in 5D, turn to tell the bearded guy in a baseball cap beside her, 

“Honestly, it’s just good to be vertical — because, at my age, you never know. You just don’t know what a day or the future holds.”

Nothing’s a given —- and everything’s a gift.

And don’t we know it, with all this old world whirling and all that the headlines keep barking, and as I’m passing them both, looking for 25A & empty overhead bin space, I hear him mutter to her,

“Yeah, that’s for sure — nothing’s a given.”  

And something fills some of the empty space in me & I stop in my tracks, mid-aisle, because isn’t that the reality:

Nothing’s a given —- and everything’s a gift.

That the sun rose and this morning we opened our eyes one more time when that might not have been our story at all. Air and hope miraculously expanded our lungs with real possibility. This very breath filling your lungs in this moment, this next heartbeat pulsing life-blood through your veins, this singular moment of being fully alive in your own skin … Getting to even exist, it is not a given, it’s gifted.  

Nothing’s as wildly dangerous as entitlement, when everything’s a gift to be wildly thankful for. 

When the world’s a bit on fire, the smell of smoke can wake you straight up: Nothing’s a guaranteed certainty —  but everything’s certainly a gift.  

Health’s not a given, freedom’s not a given, home’s not a given, family’s not a given, this day’s not a given, this next breath’s not a given — every iota of our being is not an expected given — but everything is an unexpected gift.  

Nothing’s as wildly dangerous as entitlement, when everything’s a gift to be wildly thankful for. 

When nothing’s a given and everything’s a gift, how can we live anything but brazenly grateful? 

It’s a cosmic, striking paradox, that I can’t afford to miss or I’ll miss out on the awe of every day… of this day: 

Absolutely nothing is automatically handed to us as an earned or deserved given — and absolutely everything is divinely handed to us, as grace upon grace. Nothing’s wasted, nothing’s a foregone conclusion, nothing’s impossible, and nothing’s a given, handed to us as already settled — and everything’s a gift, handed to us because we are already loved. 

And when you live like the world’s not a given, but a gift, you move from being largely reactive — to being receptive to love…. enlarged by love.

After I slip my bag into the overhead bin above 25A, after I tuck my passport and ticket away in my wallet, after I get buckled in and pull up the window shade to see the light, I can hear this small voice of a little girl directly behind me, singing it over and over again, to her little brother, like she’s heard the phrase somewhere and she can’t stop saying it again and again ….and again, smitten with the wonder of saying those two words over and over to the world:

“Pay attention! Pay attention! Pay attention!”

Pay attention to the light all around you, pay attention to faces and laughter and the sounds of the symphony of this whole, old world, pay attention to the way being alive feels in your body, the way cold water feels to swallow straight down, the way ground feels under your feet, step after step, the way the air of this singular day feels right there on your face — it’s all gift, gift, gift …. for you, you, you! 

There are countless people today who would give just about anything to get to live this day that you’re taking as a given.

I wrote it once, when I wrote about writing down thanks for One Thousand Gifts:

“I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. But I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy — in the Giver — who saves us?

The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?“

There are countless people today who would give just about anything to get to live this day that you’re taking as a given.

People fighting to just get out of bed, people fighting for a bit more time with their beloveds, for one more day, for a way forward, people fighting for their very lives, and they now don’t dare take the ordinary for granted, but receive every moment as the extraordinary gift that it literally is.

Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention! What you attend to, tends to become your life. 

And when you pay attention to how everything today is an unexpected gift — you’ll actually do something today to be an actual gift t back to an undone world.  

Those who are the contemplativists, truly contemplating the grace of all the gifts, become activists to truly live grace and share the gifts with all the hurting.

All through that flight, over one little corner of the world, that little voice behind me sings it like a song she can’t stop singing, that she won’t stop singing, and I can’t get over how surreal and divine it seems, to hear her right there at my ear, and now it’s the song I can’t get it out of my head every day—

 Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention! 

What you attend to, tends to become your life. 

Pay attention to God, pay attention to what is true and noble and right and good (Phil 4:8), pay attention to His Word, for it is your life and your only real lamp, pay attention to the Spirit and surrender to His breath that gives you real life, and pay attention to grace —to become grace.

It’s true and it’s painful and it’s complicated and it’s a daily choice: There are a thousand things demanding your attention, but what you pay attention to is how you spend your only life.

Slow the pace. Live awake. Live at the speed of grace. Give grace, live grace. Savor, savor, savor. Joy is the savoring of even the crumbs. Discern whether or not to pay attention to certain things, and how to pay attention to the things that enlarges the light, that shares all His light. Pass on grace, pass on gifts, be a gift.

Pay attention to gifts everywhere and you spend your only life on joy. And you become more of the joy the world desperately needs.

The only settled assumption worth fully settling into is that everything’s a holy given, gifted by a good and redeeming God. 

The day holds gifts of glorious halos of light.

Hands open.

Receptive.

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How to Look for Joy when Everything’s Uncertain & Nothing’s a Given