MAD MATH

by an Old Disciple

“…but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.”- Phil. 3:13

I remember as a boy in school, my teacher emphasizing the importance of carrying over in problems of addition. Well, that may work in math, but you’ll go mad trying it in life. Dragging the past over into the present only creates a bigger problem. It never solves it; it only adds to it. As C.S. Lewis says, “Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”

I think George MacDonald got it right when he wrote, “The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years-in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.”

In these, my latter years, I’m learning that the Christian life is basically a moment by moment trust in the Lord. God, speaking through His prophet Isaiah, and likening His people to a vineyard says, “I the Lord do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day.”