You have probably been wondering why my last few posts have been about embracing life, and living in the present. Or maybe you haven’t. But as I head closer and closer towards marriage, I am realizing how fast life pasts us by, and how we seldom sometime take the opportunity to enjoy life from one destination to the next. Life can be more about achieving goals and moving from one to the next, than it is about relationships, quality time, silence.

I am in Arizona this weekend at one of my best friend’s weddings. And it seems upon returning that I am about the only one not married. Not only am I not married….yet. But I’m also the friend without any kids. All my friends have kids. And all of their lives are drastically different than mine.

I have been living out in Los Angeles, pursuing school, chasing down some dreams, and my friends have been doing the same, but also getting married and raising families. It seems obvious that Arizona is a much more dating, marrying, having a family, friendly society.

And after watching my friends run around with their kids, and watching how the trajectory of their lives have changed so much, I am somewhat envious, and am to looking forward to getting married and having a family one day.

Most of you who read this blog, my college students are not near marriage and are not thinking about it. But what being with my friends reminded me is that life goes by really fast, and it is a good thing to embrace and enjoy it. It’s also a good thing to remember what is important. Things like friends, and family, and making good decisions that promote those relationships. Los Angeles is not a culture that promotes the quality of relationships too much, and I think that we can at times become pretty selfish as we head down the path towards fulfilling all of our own goals, at the risk of sacrificing some important things.

There is a time to be single. And there is a time to marry…at least for some of you. Enjoy the stage that you are in, but prepare yourself in both your singleness and dating and marriage, to go down the path that is most beneficial to the relationships that make up your life.

This is my daily rant for this weekend……now off to the wedding.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.” -
–Maria Ranier Rilke

That is perhaps one of my favorite statements from one of my favorite poets. We all have a lot of questions in our life right now, that we would like to be answered right now. Like, “Why is it so hot in Arizona?” (I’m home for the weekend at a friend’s wedding, and forgot how hot it gets..in May). Or, “What am I going to do when I graduate?” Or “Who am I going to marry?” These are some of the questions that are common, and can plague us. Everyday questions that we all live in.

Your question may be different. It may be as unimportant as, “What am I going to eat tonight?” Though I guess that question becomes important if our answer has been In and Out everytime. And then they might be more serious, like, “When is my mother going to be healed of cancer?” The point is, we all live with many questions. Some questions have immediate and simple answers to them, and others do not.

But what I have realized as being important is not the questions themselves, always, but rather how we approach the questions. How we live in the questions. Maybe some questions are not to be answered, like, the question of evil in the world, or, “If God is all powerful, and all good, then why is there so much sufferring?” Maybe I am not to answer that question. I spent a good deal of my time in seminary and other times in my life pondering questions that may not always have answers. And I have learned to live with those questions, without trying to have all the answers. Maybe someday they will come, and maybe they won’t.

Maybe I will never know why my mom died of breast cancer when I was 11 years old. That cannot be answered, at least not to my satisfaction. And too much questioning of that question, takes away from the living.

I am coming to believe that one of the most important ways that we can embrace life in it’s fullest…today..and live it most abundantly, is when we learn to live in the questions. When we learn to live in the tension of not knowing.

As Rilke so eloquently puts, maybe we are not able to live properly in the questions we have at this point in our life. Maybe there will be a time when the answers will come to our questions and we will finally feel like we can live life. But we cannot wait until that time. We are to live life now, questions and all.

I think for many Christians, myself included, we can often be more about trying to sufficely answer all the questions we have about life, and about God, before we go on living. We are not always comfortable about living in mystery. So we work really hard at memorizing all the correct apologetic doctrine to help keep us armed, and to help us answer any question that may come up. Because God forbid we are ever unable to answer a question (in case you can’t tell from my tone, I am being sarcastic..haaa).

Maybe we should live each day to its fullest, questions and all. And if God so chooses to, He may one day reveal the answers to these questions we have.

My main question right now is, “Will I be able to possibly get everything done before my wedding?” If that’s my main concern, then I might not fully live and appreciate the time I am living in right now…before the wedding.

I am very excited about a new endeavor I am taking on here. I will be reviewing books for Mind and Media, which is a blog dedicated to this very thing…reviewing books, especially those that deal with issues of faith.

The first book I will be reviewing will be Escaping the Matrix, published by Baker Publishing Group.

You might be wondering to yourself why you have been coming to my blog and not seeing much change…not much new information…no new writing. My only excuse, and it is not a good one, is that life has just been too, too busy.

Between planning a wedding out of state (June 18), buying a new house, working with carpenters, plumbers and electricians…and oh yeah..my job with college ministry, and preaching every week…life has been really busy. I have experienced busyness before. I have experienced life when you feel like you can’t possibly make one more decision, or do one more task, otherwise you may just mentally break down. But this is really the first time that I have had this many, life changing, life altering events…all happening at once. Getting married, buying a house is a lot of life changing. And oh yeah…I forgot to mention. I’m starting a Master’s degree at Fuller Theological Seminary in September in Marital and Family Therapy. I will still be the full-time college pastor here at Bel Air, but I believe God has been calling me a long time to get more professional training in counseling.

So life is busy. All of us are busy. Many of us have plans, and we are working towards those plans. Some of us have even put “life on hold” while we work towards our plans, toward our future. We have two year plans. We have four year plans. We tend to live life in blocks of time, or we tend to not live it at all unless we move past that block of time into what we consider life.

We say things like, “As soon as I graduate, then I will get a real job.” “I will grow up when I graduate.” Or, “I will date someone more seriously, or who is more right for me when I get out of this phase.” We all say things like this.

But I have begun to realize an important lesson recently. I have always thought this way, but I have never really lived this way. Our life, our living…it is now. It is not in the future, it is not when we have our act together, it is not when we have “our ducks in a row.” But most of us instead, tend to wait for those things to happen.

I had the privelege of having lunch yesterday with Hugh Hewitt. Hugh is someone I respect, and I wanted his advice on some things, and I wanted to thank him for all his help. And I realized, Hugh is a busy guy. But he is not someone who uses busyness to keep him from the daily living of life. He is embracing life right now, and going after the things that are important to him, and pursuing the things that he wants to accomplish. And after our lunch I felt encouraged about pursuing more immediately some of the goals and desires that I have for more life. I could wait, and put them off, and hope for better conditions, or I could pursue them now. Rearrange my priorities so that they align more correctly with my desires. Hopefully never removing my relationship with God, my future wife, or my family from the top of that list.

I may have watched one of the worst movies I have ever seen on Sunday night. I went and watched A Lot Like Love. Okay..maybe it’s not the worst ever, but it’s pretty bad. You judge for yourself. But there was something I walked away with from that movie, once again as a reminder to me that God is sovereign and works in mysterious ways. But one of the main themes in the movie was that life is what is happening to you right now. Life is not what we put off, and hope that the future will be much better. Ashton Kutcher’s character has his six year plan layed out, and once he accomplishes that, then he can work on other things. He can go on with life. But the problem is, life keeps passing him by. Because he is waiting, he misses out on the people, and the things that are right before him.

It was a reminder to me that life is what we have before us. It is our friends, our family, our work, our passions, and hobbies. It is not what we don’t have, and our waiting to someday attain. As a Christian, I do live in hopeful expectation of the future, of living in the presence of God for eternity. But as a Christian, God has called me to embrace life right now..in its fullest, and to live it abundantly. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

Embrace where God has you right now, and don’t keep waiting for the future to happen to you.