Blessings to YOU in this New Year!

My good friend Rosalyn penned these words a few months ago. Her title was One Point At A Time.

As I read it, I thought this is a perfect post for the new year. I know I want to become better at staying in the moment and receiving the grace Jesus has to offer. I hope you to are blessed, encouraged, and motivated by Rosalyn’s story and how she heard from God in the midst.

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I’m not sure if any of you are tennis fans, but even if you’re not, you may well have heard of the British teenager who recently made sporting history by winning the US Open.

I’ve loved following Emma Raducanu’s story, and enjoyed watching some of the post-match interviews. In one of them she shared a trade secret: as far as she is able, Emma tries to take each point at a time. She doesn’t allow herself to become overawed by the potential consequences of winning or losing that particular point. It’s just one point at a time: she stays in the moment.

This Sunday past, as I started to put the house to bed and prepare for the new week, I thought over her comments. Stay in the moment. A point at a time. I was finding that tricky, you see. My physical body was in a Sunday evening, but my mind, and consequently my emotions, were in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… I felt the hackles of anxiety rise up as I imagined the early starts, the logistics, the emails that are long-overdue a reply to. Urgghh..

What is it, about us as humans, that struggles to stay in the moment?

‘Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow has enough worries of its own’ Jesus says in Matthew 6:34, suggesting that this is not just a tendency of the modern day. We find it so hard just to be present in the now..

A number of years ago I heard someone discussing the verse 1 Peter 1:13b, which says this:

‘…set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming.‘

The person remarked that usually this verse is interpreted in the context of the hope of Jesus returning sometime in the future. But, this person went on to comment, there is no reason not to also relate this verse to the grace brought to us in the immediate moment, in the very present revelation of Jesus’s continuing and unending presence, right there in the midst of the place we find ourselves in.

Over the years, I’ve found myself using this verse as somewhat of a challenge:

Go on then, show me. Show me how you’re going to reveal yourself to me in the midst of this messy, frustrating, situation.

Show me.

Show me the grace that is to be brought to me.

Right here, right now, when all of life is going belly-up, when I’m stuck in the middle of tensions that seem to overwhelm. I’m tired, all I want to do is lose my rag. Right here, show me. Show me.

And over the years, whenever this particular gauntlet is laid down, I have found that grace is indeed given. The flickering of my eyes heavenward, the desire to see Jesus with me in the mire, has an immediate affect.

I won’t lie and say that this affect is always what I want. I don’t always receive supernatural wisdom, supernatural diplomacy. Sticky situations don’t immediately resolve themselves. But something of the framing of all this inelegance is altered.

It’s hope, of course. Hope.

Hope then allows for us to be pliable with our goals. I take my goals for whatever situation I find myself, and in that eyes-flickering-to-heaven moment, I submit them, in hope, to Jesus. Released from my own determined drive towards compliance/harmony/respect (or all those things and more), my only goal becomes squinting my eyes to see Jesus revealing himself. My only goal is to become a recipient of his grace.

But how, you may ask, does this all tie in with Emma Raducanu?

It all ties in, because we only receive grace in that moment, for that moment.

I don’t need to worry about tomorrow, not because tomorrow won’t have anything to worry about, but because I will only receive the grace for tomorrow’s worries, tomorrow. Today I receive the grace for today. Jesus is relentlessly present in our lives with an grace-filled immediacy that transforms everything of our experience of that moment. It’s not that we need to go anywhere to find him, we just need to get more practiced at recognising the fact he’s already here.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. But, as you might imagine Emma Raducanu has had to mentally train herself to stay in the moment, so too we need to train the muscles of our soul, not to look towards tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, and the troubles they may very well bring, but, in the only moment that we are actually able to inhabit – the present moment – to turn and look to Jesus.

To look with expectancy – Jesus is going to reveal himself! Grace is going to be given!.

To look with curiosity – Jesus is going to reveal himself! Grace is going to be given!

And to look with hope– Jesus is going to reveal himself! Grace is going to be given!

After all, as Matthew 6:25-27 says –

 ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?  Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?  Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?’

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Thank you again, Ros, for letting me share your words on Echoes. We are blessed!