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It turns out this matters more than we have come to believe. Consider this reflection from Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer:

A waiting person is a person practicing patience.

The word patience means to practice a daring willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full, in the belief that something hidden here will make itself known to us.

Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else—the better thing to be somewhere other than here. Therefore, practicing impatience is to entertain and cultivate a longing to be somewhere else.

The present moment is empty for them.

Patient people dare to stay where they are.

Patient living means living actively in the present and daringly waiting right here. Waiting, therefore, in God’s Kingdom, is not passive. It involves bravely nurturing the moment as a mother nurtures a child growing in her womb.

As Nouwen reminds us, waiting carries with it both opportunity and temptation—the opportunity to become more whole and mature, united with God, and the temptation to give way to impatience, to hustle for control, or to force our will on others.

In this second episode of Our Origin Story, we explore a core challenge to fully inhabit the present moment: the twin thieves of fixation on the past and preoccupation with the future. We examine the subtle seduction of living in the past—not only the pull of regret, but also the empty cistern of nostalgia. We also explore the thievery of vaulting ourselves prematurely into the future—not only the anxiety and fear this can produce, but how visions of what might be can quietly morph into fantasies of a better life somewhere else or with someone else, rather than in the place and with the people to whom we are presently called.

Join us as we take a deeper dive, considering both the temptation and the gift of this present moment—and the audacious joy of coming home to where we are, here and now, held within the epic story of God revealing who He truly is and restoring all of His creation, together, with us.

It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan & Cherie