Looking

This morning I taught my seminary students about Matthew Chapter 14 when Peter is walking to Christ on the water and begins to sink the moment he looks away, distracted by the wind.
A few lessons ago we talked about the eye being single to the body. When the eye is focused on God, the body is full of light.
 I've begun mountain biking recently and was taught by Sam that if you don't want to run over a rock or root in the trail, you don't look at it.
A good friend had a baby today and I was thinking about how her life will now change--how she will have moments where she'll look back and think about how her life was simpler before.
I've thought a lot about how I look back to college and view my life as simpler than it is now--having only the responsibility to be a student and date around.
All these thoughts washed through my head in a matter of seconds and seemed to culminate in a lesson that I continue to learn. Where we look is so important. If we are looking to the past, we will digress. If we are looking to the future when 'things will be simpler' or 'we will have more time' we will move toward it.  And when we get there we'll realize things never were simple nor do they become so. We never had enough time and we never will.  We'll realize that the whole time we were looking forward to that more simple future, we were taking for granted the present. And maybe by the end of this life we will learn to love where we are at, to love where we have been, and to love where we are going. Maybe we'll understand that the reason we never have enough time is so we can learn to prioritize our time in a way that doesn't prompt us to look behind or too far ahead, but to be here now.