Tomorrow Never Knows

Please don’t ask me what I’m going to do with my theological education and spiritual and pastoral formation. Like Mary of Bethany, I am going to do the needful thing.

I am not interested in a job or a career. I do not worry about whether I should enter lay ecclesial ministry or proceed to a doctoral program. Mind you, I am forming clearer ideas about these things for the immediate future, but these are only temporary and provisional ideas, lacking definite certainty. I am much more interested in thinking and praying about the Absolute Future. This Absolute Future is hidden in God and revealed by God alone, so you can’t bring it about by your own means. This future meets us; we do not go out to reach it like one of so many other goals. So I act, but I really don’t make plans. I stopped making plans several years ago. Instead, I get ready.

If you are willing to subordinate your concerns about things that are transitory and finite to those things that have to do with the eternal and infinite, then we can talk. If you are willing to subordinate your concerns about a merely worldly future to those concerns that have to do with a more-than-worldly future, then we can have a conversation. If you are not, then we will not have much to say to each other.

Take note—subordinate does not mean denigrate or ignore! Working to effect a world of mercy and justice and genuine peace is a commitment none can avoid. None are to be excused from the work of building loving relationships, fruitful friendships, and firm fellowships. But all of this work for a better world is grounded in the open, infinite, mysterious unknown tomorrow of God.

Therefore, I am not interested in your being fearful about my financial security if that is your first and last interest. Likewise, I am not interested in your being fearful about my health security. I am not even interested in your being fearful about my so-called “food security.” I feel sorry for you if you are troubled by these many things only in and for themselves.

I don’t know what I am going to do in the future. I don’t know the future. I am content to let the future as Absolute Future come to me. Whether I sit or stand or jump or jive or speak or hold my peace, however I witness to the arrived and coming rule of God, I wait actively with the Spirit and work with proleptic intentionality, so that in this unsettled world all may sit and listen for the mystery.

Thank God for Jesus, who told anxious Martha to leave Mary alone.