This week's Theme: The Living Present
Day 1: Plans and Stores
The steamer trunk sat in my great aunt’s bedroom, stately, regal, undisturbed. I could only allow my brimming curiosity a few furtive glances—I didn’t dare unleash a torrent of scolding along the lines of “Yuh too fahs!” (None of your business!) It would be many years before I would finally see its carefully guarded treasure.
Not that I was completely in the dark about the contents—steamer trunks, usually appointed to the same purpose, were fairly common in certain homes—a fact that fascinated me, since for the most part, I knew of no travel done by the people who owned them.
But travel connections abounded. After World War II, Britain's Nationality Act had opened a wave of immigration from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom. The newcomers had gone mostly by ships that went regularly from Caribbean harbors to various port cities in the UK.
By the time I was born, the "reverse colonization" brilliantly described by Jamaican poet Louise Bennett was largely over. Somehow, though, the steamer trunks remained. They became for people like my great aunt, the cornerstone of a “Just in Case” plan.
Just in case you had to go to the hospital, it was important to have “good nighties” and “nice dusters” and “decent underwear.” So year after year, nightdresses, dressing gowns (robes) and the best new underwear made their way into the steamer trunk, along with towels, face towels (hand towels), washrags (washcloths), and anything else that would be needed for a hospital stay.
For many people, that hospital stay never came. Time, distance, access, and circumstances dictated otherwise. And often, a steamer trunk full of beautiful, unworn intimate garments would ultimately roll over into someone else's “Just in Case” plan… And loved ones (mostly abroad) would be quite shocked to discover that the precious, sacrificial gifts they had purposed as splashes of beauty, comfort, and enjoyment, had remain untouched.
Planning is, of course, good and prudent. But a balanced plan accounts for the present and the future. Undue, obsessive, or lopsided preoccupation with the future can rob us of precious gifts meant to be enjoyed now.
“Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” the Lord Jesus asks pointedly (Matthew 6:27). He continues, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34).
The poet Longfellow borrows from our Lord's instruction in some of the lines of A Psalm of Life:
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ~ 1838
And so, in the living Present, I will do the best I can to plan for, yet not trust in the Future; but only in the One who holds the future. I will resolve to embrace what is meant to be enjoyed now—with gratitude—and freely scatter my gifts abroad. And I will look for opportunities to do as the Lord instructed, and store up...treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal (Matthew 6:20).
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