People often think of time as an elastic band stretching away back from the present Now into the past and forward from Now into the future. They can be so anxious and worried about the future, and sometimes grieve and fret for the past, that they hardly notice the present moment: Now.
Yet Now is the only moment of time that we really have. St. Paul reminds us that Now is the day of salvation. Save each Now and you save your whole life; Only one Man ever did that perfectly.
Now is always the day of salvation because God always is. God revealed himself to Moses as the “I AM”, the One who is always unchangeably sufficient for every need of every moment of our lives. The Saints speak of the Eternal Now as a kind of window into Heaven. There is a deep inward serenity and peace in that Eternal Now, because that is where we can meet God, and the place where He can really meet us.
God loves us as we are Now, and God’s love is attracted not merely to what is like himself in us, as human love is, but He is even attracted by what is unlike Him in us, because He longs to draw us up into his own eternal life. That is why when we were still sinners, Christ died for us. God’s love is utterly self-giving, a love that seemed so outrageous when it was manifested in the flesh in Jesus Christ that even the best religious people were too narrow for it and conspired against him.
This Christmas give yourself the gift of Now and begin the New Year with the fact that God loves you Now, as he has done from before the beginning of time and will do for ever.
The past is gone. The future never is. Now is the day of Salvation.
Have a Blessed Christmas and New Year.
