Present Tense: Living In the Here & Now

I began writing books late in life, but unfortunately I hadn’t paid attention in my college lit classes.

OK, I’ll be honest. One semester I hardly went to lit class. It was the semester I was making a run for our dorm ping-pong championship, and the matches seemed to always take place during class. It was either Thucydides or etching my name in table tennis history. I chose to etch.

So when I decided to write down my thoughts for others to read, a friend recommended I get a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White to cover the fundamentals. I was prone to shifting tenses, and I paid particular attention to the following rule: “In summarizing the action of a drama, use the present tense.”

I like to write about the story of God’s redemption of the world—which is certainly drama—but I often struggle to keep it in present tense. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus can seem like historical events. I venerate and celebrate them as central to my faith, but I tend to keep them in the past nonetheless. The Bible tells of God’s relationship with humanity, and I am given a front row seat to watch it all unfold—but somehow that was then and this is now.

My faith also sees the drama of God pointing forward to a glorious future. The hope of heaven, the end of suffering, and the culmination of God becoming all in all are future realities that I anticipate. God has done so much, and I believe there is more still He will do.

“Has done”—that’s past tense. “Will do”—that’s future tense. But what about present tense? What if the most decisive thing happening in the drama of God’s story isn’t what did happen or what will happen, but what is happening?

I once thought of “eternal life” as pertaining to the afterlife, but Jesus defined it as “knowing God” (John 17:3), which sure sounds like the here-life. Maybe the Bible isn’t just about people of the past but is also my story once I understand myself in light of all its characters. Jesus’ resurrection took place 2,000 years ago, but isn’t He living within me now?

Perhaps God wants to offer love, healing, peace, and freedom to a suffering world through me. Now. After all, aren’t I part of the body of Christ here on earth? What am I waiting for?

Once a group of religious leaders approached Jesus about when the kingdom of God would come. Jesus simply said it already had: “The kingdom of God is not coming with something observable; no one will say, ‘Look here!’ or ‘There!’ For you see, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21).

Is it just me, or do we Christians tend to look everywhere but “among us” to find God? I go to church to worship God; God is at church. I study the Scriptures to know God: God is in the pages. I pay attention to the words of certain spiritual leader: God is in their voices. I imagine my prayers ascending upward; God is in the sky. Certainly these are ways to know God, but somehow I’ve largely missed it.

In Colossians 1:27, Paul wrote, “God wanted to make known to those among the Gentiles the glorious wealth of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” When we worship, read, listen, or pray, it is the Spirit within enabling us to connect with God, understand truth, and live as children of God. Maybe Jesus’ “the kingdom of God is among you” phrase is the key to present-tense Christianity.

The kingdom of God is a kingdom of love, peace, joy, and freedom. If the King Himself resides within us, it only stands to reason that the kingdom can be experienced as a present reality. A reality lived in the world through us. A reality lived among humanity today. The Pharisees were expecting it to one day drop down from the sky. Instead Jesus told them to look among themselves. I wonder if they said, “No way! That’s too simple and obvious.”

But so it is. It’s the last place we look. Yet it lies secretly and silently within and among us, waiting to be discovered and experienced in the here and now. Maybe E. B. White’s grammar recommendation applies to life in God: “Use the present tense.”

(OK, just one more quick look at the past: Sadly I did not win that ping-pong championship. So I decided to take up pool That’s when I started missing my Intro to Sociology class.)