Episode #260 - Tomorrow

We often get lost in the idea of tomorrow without realizing the consequences.

Transcript

Welcome to Episode #260 – Tomorrow. I am your host Damon Socha.  There exists a section of the Sermon on the Mount we don’t discuss much except in a very general way.  Right after we hear the Savior talk about our inability to serve two masters comes this section of the text.

25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

This section of the sermon exposes something within each of us that is common to mortality.  The idea of tomorrow.  Tomorrow is a unique concept for the mind.  Our mind tends to see the tomorrow we create as reality.  Meaning our tomorrow is created through the lens of our past.  Our mind takes what it knows about tomorrow and creates a predictive reality where it can test various scenarios.  Our mind will then run our emotions over the various activities we have planned for the day.  Testing scenarios real and not so real.  This is the nature of our brains.  Now some brains take this to the extreme and others not nearly far enough.  We vary greatly as human beings as to how we rehearse our life before the final performance.  Some of us like to rehearse and then play it by ear and some of us like to over-rehearse our life until we have scavenged every possible bad scenario and played it through our minds eye over and over again.  Members of the mental health community tend to fall into the latter category.  We like to over-think, over- predict and over-rehearse.  This naturally causes some serious issues in our lives.

We see the Lord giving a warning here that we can get so lost in preparing for tomorrow that we lose track of what is important.  For instance, we may work diligently until we are 65 to provide for a retirement.  We can do everything possible to provide for a fun filled adventure in our golden years only to learn that we have cancer at 63 and that it will take all our retirement just to keep us alive for the next four years.  We can also give up today worrying about what will happen tomorrow.  For example, I work in the construction industry and often we have to give presentations to groups of owners.  This takes some coordination and effort and we generally practice the interview scenario a few times.  However, I have learned that too much practice can cause an unusual phenomenon.  If we worry too much about the performance and practice it over and over again, we tend to perform lower than if we had only practiced a few times.   We can work ourselves into a frenzy over very little.  We can overthink it.  This overthinking causes our mind to run roughshod over what is real, our habits and any rationality and then often affects our performance.  Elite athletes refer to it as a slump.  We can allow our minds to interfere with our performance because we think too much about what we are doing and instead of using habits and instinct we try to think about it.  This occurs in sports but also in real life.  When you live within a demanding religion that has an end goal of perfect.  One’s life can be very similar to an elite athlete in that we are daily working to improve spiritually.  We have high expectations and goals to attain and habits to form.  And yes we can get in our own way at times.  We can worry too much about tomorrow that we forget today.  We can focus so much on a future performance that we unintentionally cause issues of anxiety and fear to occur where they need not be.  We can run faster than we have strength by focusing too much on the finish line.  We get to the finish line by staying in the present in far better shape than if we worried about it on a daily basis.  Perfection will come but not today or tomorrow or the next day.  There will be a day just not likely in this life.  And that is one of the keys to understanding tomorrow.  Daily growth is likely to be small.  We will struggle to see a difference day to day.  And this does often cause worry but it shouldn’t.  We need to just focus on today’s experiences and making today’s experiences meaningful spiritually.  Once we have goals we focus on what matters today.  And in so doing we consistently check with the Lord as to what matters most.

When the Lord says Take no thought for the morrow, I am certain he is not saying.  Don’t plan anything I got this.  You just sit in front of the TV and I will bring everything to you by ravens like I did with Elijah.  The Lord is all about planning and executing the plan.  In point of fact, the entire creation was planned before it was brought forth.  The entire history of the planet was also contemplated as the earth was split into its current boundaries.  The Lord plans and he expects us to plan as well.  So he is not saying don’t plan anything.  We are expected to have long and short range goals.  He is not saying don’t plan for retirement or be a wise steward of your money.  These things are important.  What he is talking about is priorities.  When we think about tomorrow what is it we are doing?  What are we trying to accomplish?  When we are planning what is it we are accomplishing?

I am by nature a planner and my wife says far too much of a planner.  I like things organized and scheduled.  So when the Lord says “Take no thought for the morrow” I stand up and listen.  Why would the Lord tell me not to plan?  That just doesn’t make sense to me.  Now priority planning does make sense and I think that is part of the answer.  When we consider what we need for tomorrow, we should consider more than just our wants and needs.  We should consider what the Lord’s wants and needs are and then what matters most to him.  When we plan, we consider what the Lord would want.  Planning is incredibly important but if we spend most of our time planning we are not executing the day.  We can literally lose today planning for tomorrow and do the same thing the next day.  We can literally get lost in tomorrow.

There is something to be said about staying in the moment.  Finding peace where you are.  Finding your footing even when the path might be a little slippery.  Every moment we spend in the future we lose in the present.  We can spend our entire life in the future and never have a present.  Always waiting for something or someone that never comes.  Take for instance a young women who when she comes to the normal years of marriage expects that she will receive a proposal.  Years come and go and suddenly she is no longer in the younger dating game.  She has been transported to a new world of older dating.  She had always thought she would marry and she becomes fixated waiting upon a marriage for her life to start.  She is stuck waiting for a future that may never come or if it does will not look like she had expected.  If she continues to force marriage as a starting point in her life, she will never progress.  However, if she refocuses that future to include marriage when it comes and that she can focus on other parts of her life right now.  This allows for a much greater present happiness.  One of the main problems with living in the future or waiting for the future to come is that happiness never comes.  You are always waiting for it.  I will be happy when I find true love, when I get my dream job, when I have children, when I have grandchildren.  

The same thing can happen when you consistently live in the past.  You can never be happy in the present because you are always reminiscing about the good old days.  Whether we are in our past or in our future, we lose valuable and precious time in the present.  Think of Laman and Lemuel after their eight year journey through the Saini Peninsula.  The only thing they could recall was that they would have been better off in Jerusalem.  They wasted eight years living in the past.  Think of the marvelous things they saw such as the Liahona, miraculous blessings of food and resources.  When they sat in Bountiful, a place that had everything they needed.  All they could do was reminisce about the good old days in Jerusalem.  They had been unhappy for eight years because they simply would not live in the present or see happiness in the present.  When we suffer with our episodes of mental and emotional health, we tend to do this.  We tend to live in the past or in the future because our present doesn’t feel very good.  We attempt to pull happiness into our lives by living a future life.  We simulate what life might be like if we were not ill.  We think about how happy we would be if we didn’t have our mental and emotional illness.  We think about how everything would be perfect if we could just find a cure.  And we can spend years in this cycle hoping that our lives will change waiting for our future to come.  And just like Laman and Lemuel we can miss the blessings of the present.  Nobody likes pain, nobody likes suffering.  Our body truly does everything it can to avoid pain.  So when pain is part of our present our mind looks to forward to the moment of release.  I get it.  I have been there.  However, we miss so much pining for better future days.  What about today?  What about now?  Can you do something now to improve your situation?  Can you give your future over to the Lord?  Can you live in the moment?

What does that even mean?  I have asked myself repeatedly.  Live in the moment.  Be present in the moment.  It means to enjoy the moment for what it gives.  It means when your mind wanders off to the future you bring it back to the present.  If you are always waiting for your son or daughter to graduate from college you are going to miss a great deal of things between their birth and college.  But if you are always focused on college then your happiness will be stunted until they begin college.  We do this all the time, we defer our happiness to another day rather than take what happiness we can in the midst of the suffering.   So what does this look like practically.  This means that rather than dream of tomorrow, do what can you do right now.  If this means just a shower, then so be it.  If it means you can only read a scripture or two, then that is success.  If it means that you can only paint a background on your picture, then you are satisfied with those brush strokes.  It means we are satisfied with what we have the capacity to do and we try not to pine for more energy, more ability, more capacity.  We live within our mortal and spiritual means.

Now I am not saying that this is easy.  In point of fact, this is perhaps the most difficult of trials.  When the Lord removes capacity and ability, we are asked by him to accept our diminished roles until such time as he sees fit to release us.  For instance, taking a lesson from my own life.  I love to work outside.  I always have.  My father instilled this in me young and I have found great joy in work.  About 15 years ago a disease entered my body that caused my current disability and arthritis problems and limited my ability to work.  The Lord slowly removed my capacity and I have struggled to adapt.  I have really struggled if you ask my wife.  As the Lord has removed my capacity and abilities and forced me to learn that I have other gifts and abilities.  He has forced me to plan less and adapt more.  He has forced me to find joy and happiness in places I would never have even thought to look.  I have learned to write and to paint.  I have begun to learn a divine patience.  I am certain the same is likely true for you.

So what does the Lord expect of us discussion of tomorrow and yesterday.  I have found that he expects to be intimately involved in our lives.  Rather than a distant god that handles the big problems.  He is an intimate god who wants to be involved in the details.  He wants to guide us with his yoke, not the yoke we carry but his yoke.  When he talks of a yoke where the burden is easy and light, he is speaking of his yoke.  As we come to him, he gently removes our yoke and places his upon us and then begins to teach us.  Why should we not be so worried about tomorrow?  One because once we have our day planned, my experience is that the Lord typically has a different one planned.  We can force our way into OUR planned day and stick to what we planned or we can allow the Lord to take our plan and make it his own and then allow us to experience it.  

The hardest part in all this is the letting go. Seeing and trusting the Lord when we are lost in the emotional fray of life.  The most difficult part is that our mortal brain is not wired to trust.  We learn to trust but even then, the learning curve is steep.  So we may not trust all at once.  So be it.  Give the trust you can to the Lord.  He will use it to earn more trust of you.  Learning to trust the Lord doesn’t come easy and so we often give it piece by piece to the Lord.  That is fine as long as we continue to give more to him.  Otherwise we are going to end up in Bountiful surrounded by beauty wishing we were back in Jerusalem.  Complaining that this whole experience has been a waste of time and energy.  I hope in my heart that like Nephi we see the Savior in the journey even if it is a difficult one.  Until next week do your part so that the Lord can do his.