Future-Tripping

By Paul Young

Alice and Bob (not their real names) are two of our younger couple-friends. They know most of our family—no small feat because we have 17 living grandchildren.

I got a call from Bob: “Paul, would you please talk to Alice? We saw our doctor a few days ago, and after a bunch of tests to diagnose the most likely source of her symptoms, he told us she probably has one of four diseases, each potentially terminal. She’s freaking out, and she isn’t listening to anything I say. Would you call her?” 

I agreed, and as soon as Bob and I hung up, I dialed her cell number. She answered, and we began with small talk, catching up about the data of our lives. It didn’t take long before she asked, “Why are you calling me in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week?”

“Oh, Alice,” I apologized. “I am so sorry. I probably should have started with that.” I paused. “I am calling to help you plan your funeral.”

Silence for a moment. Then she burst out laughing.

“So,” I asked, “what kind of music would you like? Any special songs? Anyone you want to make sure is not invited?”

At this moment you may be thinking, What a cruel human being. But am I?

“Paul, do you know what I’ve been doing the last 48 hours?” she asked. “Not sleeping. I have been on the internet finding everything I can about these four diseases, and the more information I have, the more afraid I am.” (By the way, it turned out the issue was simple and easily handled.)

Alice was caught in what I call future-tripping. Future-tripping is when fear and imagination get together and immediately produce impending doom, gloom, trauma, tragedy or difficulty. It can be something as complex as personal financial ruin or as simple as an approaching conversation. It can be as grandiose as nuclear war or worry over what others will think about the dessert I made for the party.

A few years ago, during the Pandemic, I began researching information on why a pregnant woman must get vaccinated. The more I read, the more concerned I became (concerned is a baptized word for fear). One of our daughters was pregnant, and it wasn’t long before I had an impressive stack of documentation supporting my conclusion.

On one particularly beautiful, sunny, summer day, she and her husband were swimming in the pool, and I strolled out to talk to them. And would you believe it? The conversation turned to how vitally important it was that a pregnant woman gets the vaccine.

It must have been the Holy Spirit, I said to myself, not admitting that it was actually my manipulation.

I laid out my argument, and my daughter listened respectfully.

But she didn’t buy the fear I was selling. Instead, her response was honest and straight. “Dad, I just don’t sense that this is right for me, not now.”

Did I listen to her? Not at all. After all, I am the dad and smarter than she. I became more concerned and more adamant about why I was right and she was wrong. Finally, very frustrated, I turned to our son-in-law and said strongly, “This is your baby, too. Why don’t you do something about this?”

I hope you are cringing. It got worse. I turned to look at my daughter, and tears were streaming down her face. And how did I respond? I turned and walked back into the house justifying myself. At least I told them the truth, and if she ignores what I told her to do, and if she and the baby die, I will know I did the right thing. I had spoken the truth in love, hadn’t I?

The opposite. I was justifying my fears and trying to control my daughter. I didn’t trust the Holy Spirit in her, so I tried to play the Holy Spirit for her. Thankfully, it only took half an hour before I heard the sweet and tender voice of the real Holy Spirit speak to me in the deeper places of my soul: “Paul, I love you, but you can be such an ass sometimes!”

With their clarity, those words broke me, and I did the next right thing. I went back out, knelt at the edge of the pool and asked my daughter and son-in-law if they would forgive me. They immediately gave me the gift of their forgiveness, and my daughter added, “Dad, I hope you aren’t under the impression that we think you’re perfect.”

Future-tripping. Creating a fear-based imagination of a future that does not exist and then trying to control everyone and everything so what I am afraid of does not happen. Read that last sentence again. Do you see it? Future-tripping and control are diabolical siblings. If you are a control freak, I guarantee you are also a future-tripper and that your life is riddled with fear from bottom to top.

Imagination is not evil. It is part of the powerful grandeur of being human and how God is by nature. When love and imagination dance together, we have creativity, wonder, adventure, risk-taking, fun, exploration, childlikeness and even joyful planning.

But in that moment, motivated by fear, I chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, trying to convince our daughter, whom I love, that I was right and she was wrong. It wasn’t about relationship and love, and it was not about her flourishing. It was about me. I was attempting to control my life and hers, and I had done it under the guise of speaking the truth in love.

What was my fear? I imagined attending a funeral where there was a large box in which lay our beautiful daughter, and next to hers a smaller box holding the body of our precious grandchild. The more I entertained that imagination, the more complex and suffocating it became.

I imagined walking back into a house in which she no longer lived. I imagined what our relationship with her spouse would be like. I imagined the grandchildren we would never have. This is insanity. None of it was true. None of it was real. Imagining something that did not exist was terrifying me, and I attempted to overcome my fear by controlling my grown child and her husband.

Instead, I might have eaten of the tree of life. How? I could have walked out to the pool, sat down, looked at the two of them, confessed my fears and asked them to pray for me. Eating of the tree of life would have resulted in all of us flourishing. In hindsight, I later did return to the tree of life. It was when I asked for their forgiveness.

Who are the real enemies? Let’s be clear. The enemy of love is fear. The enemy of trust is control. The word enemy is much, much, much too strong. We are not dealing with two existing realities, as if two gods were fighting it out on the battleground of the cosmos or in the human heart.

Love and trust and, similarly, goodness, kindness, joy and much more, all have ontological existence. They exist whether there is a created cosmos or not because they are grounded in the God who is. The God who is is Love by nature. Love includes trust, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, relationship and so much more. Therefore, goodness exists without evil, kindness without meanness, life without death, trust without control, love without fear, community without aloneness and so on.

But the delusion of fear must have the reality of love to pretend to exist. Fear describes what happens when one turns from love. Control is the illusion that is birthed when one turns from trust. Both are an absence, a rift of nothingness, the mystery of iniquity and alienation, that we humans then name and empower as real. The result has been and continues to be catastrophic.

Have you ever, in your imagination, been to your own funeral? I have. More than once. And it really ticked me off that no one else came. Have you ever imagined being so broke you ended up alone, living in a cardboard box under the local bridge? Have you imagined what it is going to be like when you see ________ (that person), and what you are going to say and how it is going to end terribly, or even well? (Future-tripping can be positive too, but still not real at all.)

Here are a few gateway drugs to future-tripping: buying a lottery ticket, hearing your boss wants to talk to you, watching the news, being told you will do something great for God, or that something showed up on the scan, or a grown child saying they never want to speak to you again and on and on and on.

Eternal life is not on a timeline. It is the ever present now. Think about it. Where and when is God living in and with you? In some imagined future? No! Your participation in eternal life, the life of God, is only now. You experience joy only in the present tense. At 50 I finally understood that joy had always been my constant companion, and it was me who was leaving, running off into some fear-based future-tripping unreality.

As followers of the sermon-on-the-mount Jesus, we must stop segmenting our lives into sacred and secular compartments. There exists no such distinction, except for those who need it to justify their behavior when at a distance from a cross. In our moment-by-moment encounter with the indwelling God, we do the next right thing with all our strength, trusting a wisdom that is greater than our understanding and letting go of the outcomes.

It is unsettling to realize God cares for the eternal and not the temporal. Business is temporal. God cares infinitely more for the eternal person in front of you, and you and all the persons impacted by your company, than for its success or failure.

To live we must dwell inside the grace of today. Grace of the day is simple. Jesus and I respond to what is right in front of us. I won’t entertain, and get caught up in, imaginations about tomorrow and how things are going to work out—or not. It is a fundamental choice to trust. What makes this complicated is my need to control. We don’t get grace today for things that don’t exist. In this present moment is where everything that is real and true exists. You, God, love, joy, peace, hope, kindness and on and on.

What about planning?

James 4:13-15 says, “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’”

As you are aware, planning in the moment may be creative and empowering, an expression of your love/trust union with God, or terrifying and disempowering, largely because of your attachment to the outcomes. James is saying, “Hold your plans loosely.” Nothing like dying to mess up a plan or a calendar. The will of God is not a blueprint hidden in a vault somewhere. Rather, it is the moment-by-moment relational love that is growing inside your union with the indwelling God who loves you and respects your humanness, including all that you bring to the adventure.

Fear will not let you stay present. It will push you out of everything that is and into a place that does not exist, where you are alone (a lie) and in which your only resources are your own (another lie).

Future tripping is a thief, taking away today’s energy, resources and relationships that empower you to respond to today’s real people and circumstances, and wastes it on things that don’t exist. This is exhausting and not living at all!

To stay present is to trust. To stay present is to live. To stay present is to love!

The world is fueled by fear, and its response is control. Love and trust are considered weak and ineffective when indeed they are the only way to live that changes anything. Fear adds to the misery. Love effects transformation.

How do we live in this world but not be of it. We stop future-tripping! Stop it!

Easier said than done, believe me. It has taken me years to do the work of letting go of control and resting into trust. Often, the god that we have believed in is not worthy of our trust, so we must go through a re-boot, a detox, maybe a bit of atheism, so the god we have embraced can be trashed for the God revealed in Jesus.

The future is known only and fully in and by the being of God, eternal Love. Human beings are incredibly creative beings. If you say you are not a creative, I will simply ask you if you have ever been worried about anything. If you have, you are a creative. To worry you become a screenwriter, producer and director. You hire the actors and control their choices. And, of course, you are the star, all in a tragedy about something that does not exist.

“The more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is to leave futurity in God’s hands,” C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. “We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it with Him or not. Never, within peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the person who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment, as to the Lord. It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any response can be done, or grace received.”

Similarly, in his Pensées, Blaise Pascal writes, “Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Likewise, the Scriptures are replete with reminders that God is with us in the present and encourages us to join Him there—resisting the urge to worry about a tomorrow that does not yet exist. “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Jesus asks (Matthew 6:27). “Take no thought for tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself,” he says (Matthew 6:34).

I was once having lunch with someone who was recounting to me her many life issues, fears and burdens. When she was finished, I asked, “Is there anything that you can do or are being asked to do about any of this in this moment?”

She thought about it and said, “No.”

I paused for a moment and said, “Well, then please pass the salt.”

In that moment salt was more real than all her imagined future catastrophes. She recently emailed me and wrote, “Whenever I begin to future-trip, I say to myself, ‘Pass the salt.’”

Live in life. Walk in the light. Stay present to love. Pass the salt.

—

Paul Young, author of The Shack, Cross Roads, Eve and Lies We Believe About God, was born a Canadian and raised among a stone-age tribe with his missionary parents in the highlands of West Papua. He suffered great loss as a child and young adult and now enjoys the “wastefulness of grace” with his growing family in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.