I'm Fighting an Imaginary Future

for a better tomorrow?

I’m good at traveling. I love taking trips, but I don’t like going anywhere; instead, I prefer to stay at home and travel to the future: future tripping—it’s all the rage. Have you heard of it? Well, let me be the Marie Kondo of worst-case scenarios and tell you what brings me the most joy: meticulously organizing my imagined tomorrows into safe categories that I can manage in the present.

Future tripping allows me to live not in the here and now but in some fictional future where everything is usually going terribly wrong. Here, I get to attempt to fix it, worry about it, or just plain sulk. Now that I think about it, maybe these aren’t the most joyful kind of travels.

But what can I do? That’s how I’m wired; it’s a brain thing, really. Can’t expect me to change my brain. Though sometimes I feel like I have more anti-virus brain activity than computing power going on. The anti-virus system of my mind is actively monitoring for threats at all times—scanning futures as they are opened, about to be executed, or threatening to be downloaded—and attempting to protect myself from the imagined malware to come. It’s like I live with a continual barrage of pop-up messages telling me my future is infected and I must act now or my system will crash.

Worry is like real-time protection provided by my brain in order to make it past tomorrow without much damage to my software, a.k.a. heart. But unlike most anti-virus systems, worry isn’t running in the background. No, I’ve got skills; my worry pushes the everyday activities—like walking, working, driving, and even talking—to the background and puts all of its energy into problem-solving the future right now.

It’s like when you leave for work and suddenly you arrive, and you have no idea how you got there: auto-pilot. Well, sometimes it feels like my entire life is on auto-pilot underneath all of the worry that has me off somewhere in what I assume to be the future.

Of course, there are some troubles with this system—like failure to do your background work well, not to mention the tax on the nervous system that is trying to alert me to the future I’m living in while having one foot in the present, making sure I don’t burn myself or walk into a wall. Failure is imminent and I have the scars to prove it. But for some reason, my brain has gotten into the swing of the future, and coming back to the present is unfamiliar, if not dangerous, territory.

How do you actually live in the present? Is my question, when the future is so ripe for the worrying? It feels like gross negligence not to worry. I was just talking to a friend who said her husband didn’t understand why she worried about stuff that hasn’t happened and may never happen. And we both felt sorry for him, that he didn’t see the bigger picture or understand how much our future tripping was saving everyone from almost certain disaster.

That sounds ridiculous, but I’m just reporting my brain activity—don’t shoot the messenger. The reality is that worry is not a real bright move; I get it. It’s not protecting my future any more than trying to dig up all the weeds today that may be in my garden someday is helping my garden grow. All I’m really digging is a bunch of holes in the dirt that will probably cause me to stumble in the future.

Maybe that’s why Jesus said, “Today has enough trouble of its own, so don’t add in tomorrow’s imagined trouble; tomorrow will worry about itself,” or something like that. Maybe the reality is I’m trying to play God by imagining that I know what will happen tomorrow when in reality I don’t know a thing about tomorrow, but the real God does. I’m kind of arrogant, I must confess.

Confession: it’s good for the soul. With this confession, I share not only my own propensity to take tomorrow from the ever-capable hands of our God but also the human propensity to worry about things that are out of our control, like tomorrow. So, I hope that this hasn’t been just an exercise in self-exploration but an introduction to the future tripper’s psyche—one that will help other future trippers take the day off and stay at home in the present while enjoying reality instead of the imagination.

Since we really can’t live in the future, we only have the present. So the question is: why do we spend so much time not living in the present but languishing in the future?

It all comes down to our worldview. If we have a fearful worldview where the future is bleak, the danger is imminent, and the walls are about to crumble down around us, then we are compelled to try to fix that future with all the gusto that we can manage today. But, if we have a divine worldview, then we can see a future of favor, where no matter what the outcome, we are blessed. It’s the future Paul wrote about to the inhabitants of Ephesus when he said: "I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you may know what is the hope of his calling, what is the wealth of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the incomparable greatness of his power toward us who believe, as displayed in the exercise of his immense strength." (Ephesians 1:18-19)

Hope is a future trip that I want to take. When I hope, I don’t dig up future weeds or scan for malware. Instead, I set my sights on the fact that I can hope in God even when it looks like I can’t, and I say with Job, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15).

So, rather than focusing on fear or even on preparation, today I’m going to focus on God, knowing that He will make my ways a whole lot straighter than an ounce of my worry could do. I figure I’ve leaned on my own understanding for far too long; today it’s time to trust the Lord. Will you join me in my endeavor to stop tripping through the future and to start trusting?