Past Present & Future

The calmness of the open water draws my eyes across its surface, and my spirit flies along with my gaze, from shoreline to shoreline, across the rippled surface.

I know only the peace of this moment. 

A gentle breeze causes me to lift my head and breathe in the fresh scent of the moisture-laden air, and I feel peaceful and refreshed.

I think that I never want to leave this place.

There are moments in life that we savor, and we wish we could keep them forever, to revisit whenever we have the desire. If we could just bottle up these moments in time, we could open them up and relive the experience whenever we needed to feel uplifted.

Unfortunately my memory doesn't work with the clarity I wish it would. Though I try to remember exactly how I felt at a particular time, my memory blurs around the edges and I can only hold onto a fragment of the actual experience. I will remember the emotion, and I can take a snapshot with my camera to remember the scene, but the moment itself is lost forever.

Sometimes it is only in the letting go that we can reach for what is ahead. 

So it is with my moments with God. I soar high on the mountaintop experience, those times when I feel intimately connected to God's heart, and my own heart soars with immeasurable joy. I want to hold onto the moment, but these special moments in time are brief and impossible to grasp. In fact, the more we try to hold onto them, the more they slip away. 

Bottoms up!

Time moves on, and life is always moving forward. We cannot stay in the past. We need to keep reaching out and growing into the people we are meant to become. If we hold onto the past or the present for too long, we don't allow ourselves to realize the growth that awaits us.

We can never imagine what the future holds, and we limit ourselves if we believe that we already know what lies ahead.

So hold onto your memories, and reach into the future with anticipation of the promises that lie ahead. But savor the moment that is the present, for it will never come again.