Fully Present

I’ve been struggling with the idea of being fully present. Really it’s something that I’ve been playing with in various stages since the first year I went to Russia. Where I’ve sort of arrived at recently is that being fully present does not always mean being happy about your present situation. God can use your discomfort and even anger, but you have to acknowledge those feelings and figure out what to do with them.
Friday was a pretty rushed day for Shane and I. We had a lot to do before having to catch a train by 5:30pm in order to be at another location in the city by 7pm for youth group. (As a side note – this is God totally reinforcing in me some of the lessons that he was teaching me this summer about planning time vs. leaving space in your schedule but that’s a story for another day). We went to the library, which we are trying to do only once every two weeks, but it’s the only time that we can upload pictures – which between the two of us takes at least two hours if not more because of the speed of the internet connection. Then we ended up at an organ recital at St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral – where Shane is now attending church regularly. Three pieces were played – the second of which really touched me. Then we actually went to start our independent study work before having a “quick” dinner. And by quick I mean under an hour, which is really rushed for us. We ended up at this hole in the wall Italian restaurant that was amazing, only the portion sizes were so tiny. Even with the amazing banana pudding we had for dessert we both walked away hungry. The plan was to come back after youth group for cheesecake in Southgate, but that’s another part of the story. Up to this point in the day, being fully present meant enjoying Shane’s company, engaging each other in dialogue about what we were learning, etc. I have found that it is easier to live in the present moment if you are content or happy, but as we will see in the next part of the story that isn’t always the case.
We’ll skip right over youth group, because well, it isn’t appropriate to talk about on here beyond we have a lot of work ahead of us in the next two months and prayer would be fantastic. After youth group, Jeremiah and Lydia decided that they deserved cheesecake as well so we headed back to Flinders. During the course of our very long (and somewhat frightening) train ride, CoCo (one of our Australian friends from Kingsley) called and asked for us to meet her and her friends who were in town. Keep in mind that I loathe meeting new people, but we didn’t want CoCo to feel as if the open invitation she had made to all of us the night before was being disregarded, so we decided to go. I can at least say that Lydia and I thought this was going to be a short “hi, glad to meet you” under an hour and a half thing so we could still have cheesecake, which is not what happened. We meet CoCo and her friends and I was pretty much not a happy camper with the direction and topic of conversation which kept recycling, no matter how hard people tried to change it. Here is where I start to wonder if I failed at being fully present. Different people deal with discomfort and anger (which I feel are negative emotions in a sense) in different ways. I withdraw, big time. So that’s what I did. Lydia and I just sort of slid to the back of the group and let CoCo, Shane, and Jeremiah interact with the friends. No big deal. Only then it was easier for me to observe the entire picture of what was going on, including aching in my heart for the potential reactions of the people around us to our actions and topic of conversation. I kept trying to forget my anger and discomfort, wanting to be able to enjoy the company of CoCo and these new people. That is not being fully present. I have learned to trust my gut before and because I didn’t want to step up and tell people to stop what they were doing, I tried to change myself. I missed the opportunity that God was presenting me with to stand up for his children who were being mocked by the topic of conversation. My discomfort wasn’t wrong, and if I would have engaged it more instead of being ashamed then I could have said something radically different to these people, even if they never really changed because of it. Being fully present means working with both the positive and negative emotions and experiences, not dwelling on them, but engaging them enough to know what you should be doing or saying in a certain situation.
We’ll hop, skip, and jump over Saturday which was a picnic at hanging rock to Sunday. Sunday I felt was more of a day that reflected the original context of what Jesse said to me about being fully present in Russia. Sunday, Shane, Jeremiah, and I went to dinner with David – the only male Kingsley student in the dorms. So good. Seriously this boy can cook. David had invited about 15 people and we probably had a good 20 people in there at the height of the evening. We just played Taboo and ate pizza and enjoyed each others company. As people began to leave, our group became more intimate and we actually spent a good amount of time just singing worship songs – the impact of which I can’t really put into words. Being fully present isn’t entering into a situation with an agenda, but allowing God to work in and through the hearts of people there. It’s letting yourself be open and vulnerable and feelings. It’s this huge concept that we miss out on in life so often because we don’t want to try or because we misinterpret what it “should” look like. What would the world be like, if we just all took one day to live in the moment and to experience it fully, no matter how that manifests itself?