I watch American Idol. This is a fact that embarrasses me, but I’m committed to honesty, regardless of the level of personal shame involved. Still, I enjoy singing along with the contestants, and occasionally performing a song of my own in the privacy of my home.
On Tuesday, Mariah Carey was the guest mentor on the show, and she told David Cook, the (now) favorite to win the competition, “Live in the moment.” I don’t know why, but I have been unable to get this statement out of my mind. I have stumbled over living in a future yet to be experienced, and I have mastered living in a past wrought with joys and pains, triumphs and defeats, but I’m not sure I know how to live in the moment.
Life is full of worries and uncertainties. Lately, even much of what I thought I knew was true has turned out to be anything but. It seems that living in the moment would be the preferred mindset for me, if only I could figure out the moment.
There are moments that I wish that I could hold on to with both hands, like the first time precious Matthew tried to call me Auntie and it sounded like Hottie, and when he reached for me to comfort him in the “church” nursery, and when my cousin Trinity wrapped her 14 hour old hand around my little finger trusting me to care for her, and when I watched my parents walk into their 40th wedding anniversary party holding hands as they received a standing ovation from their 250+ guests, and when I stood at the Golan Heights in Israel with 2 pastors I (once) respected and trusted, knowing that my God had shown me the power of prayer, discernment and reconciliation by a peaceful brook in the mountains. Those are moments I have lived in and understood during those moments the intensity of those moments. I drank in those moments, was filled by those moments, was changed by those moments.
I believe that there are more moments that will move me like those moments of the past. There are moments that I have tried to just live in recently, but my head and my heart get involved, and then those moments become wishes and hopes, and then, too often, little disappointments caused by my inability to just experience the moment for what it was, for what it is — a space in time separate but relative to another space in time whose value need not be defined by me or anyone else.
So, I’m going to (in the future) try to live in the moments as they happen, trusting that I can.
ReeseFire 