We live in hurried and distracted times. “Fear of Missing Out” actually makes us miss more and more of what’s right in front of us. Adam Ramsey has some great wisdom for how to live faithfully and embrace the limits God has placed on us.

Resources:

• Faithfully Present: Embracing the Limits of Where and When God Has You by Adam Ramsey (Book)
• Liberti Church (the church where Adam pastors)
• Faithful Presence Where Your Feet Are by Adam Ramsey (Article)

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter. This is a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute, and I'm your host, Randy Newman. My conversation partner today is Adam Ramsey, the lead pastor at Liberty Church on the Gold Coast in Australia. We're 117 hours apart, or so it feels. I'm in the middle of the afternoon. He's early morning. It's just crazy! Adam, welcome to Questions That Matter.

It's good to be with you, Randy. And I'm not just in the morning, and you're in the afternoon. I'm in the future. I'm in tomorrow. So just for what that's worth.

Yeah, okay, and your book that you've written is about time and place, so this is perfect! You started by confusing us, and I guarantee by the end of this podcast, people will be even more confused. No. You've written a really great book about time and place. It's called Faithfully Present, and the subtitle is really catchy for me: “Embracing the Limits of Where and When God Has You.” What motivated you to write this book?

Well, I think a couple of things. It started with a curiosity, and then it continued with a struggle, and so here's what I mean by that: I originally had this idea of writing a book about time and place, these two realities that really do, they haunt us. They haunt us because they locate us, and they remind us we are not in charge here. We are creaturely. We are not God, because time is just moving past me, or I'm moving through it, however which way you want to look at that, and place grounds me quite literally. Place locates me and reminds me of how not omnipresent I am, despite the illusions technology gives us of being in more than one place at one time. And so I wanted to do a bit of a biblical playful theological reflection on these two things, of time and place, that remind us of our humanity.

And then as I started to write it out, a couple of years ago, my wife had a really, really significant injury to one of the COVID vaccines. and she's been incredibly sick for the last two years. There's no real cure in sight. And so, for us, it's been living in a season where we're learning to come back to something that Wendell Berry said. And I quote it at the beginning of the book, and it's become a little bit of a mantra, for lack of a better word, around our house these last couple of years, which is, “We live the given life, not the planned.” “We live the given life, not the planned.” And so we've been in that space of just learning to receive the time we are in and the place that we are in, even in a hard season of life. What does it look like to be attentive to God, to one another, to the people around us, to the place that we are in that locates us, even when we're in times and places that maybe we don't want to be. And so the book really comes out of those two realities, a curiosity and an ongoing struggle that we're still walking through.

Hmm. Well, I'm sorry about the suffering. That puts your book in a deeper light for me, if I can say it that way. Well, say a little bit more about your choice of the word embracing, because when I first started looking at your book and about time and place—by the way, these are two struggles for me. Because I regularly jump ahead to the future. That’s my mindset. And so staying present is a challenge for me. So, as I started thinking about what you're talking about in your book, I thought, “Yeah. I need to accept the limits.” But no, no, you use the word embracing the limits. So you're pushing me further. This is a very uncomfortable podcast already. I'm very disturbed by this. But why did you go with embracing?

Well, I think all of us struggle to be fully present. We can get trapped in the memories, the nostalgia, the good old days of our past, and want to live in a past time. We can lament the fact that we age, that we move through seasons of life, that our kids grow up, that our energy levels change, all those things. There can be a sense of grief that comes with that as we're reminded that, once again, we're creaturely. Or, like you just mentioned, we can want to live further along than where we are. And I think that's… I mean every kid wishes they were a big kid, and every big kid wishes they were a teenager, and every teenager wishes they were a grown up, and then every twenty something year old wishes they had their parents’ money and security and could afford a house and whatever else there. And then we get older, and we go, “Man, I wish I could be a kid again!” And so the temptation is to always live in a place and live in a time that's not our present place and our present time.

And I think that so many of the anxieties and the problems and the fears that we have come from us trying to get rid of something that Jesus didn't want to get rid of, that Jesus himself embraced. And that’s why I used that word there in the subtitle. Jesus embraced humanity. And often we're trying to rid ourselves of humanity. So we need to go further than just merely accepting our humanity and the limits that come with that humanity. And we need to learn, like Jesus, to embrace our humanity. I mean John 1:14, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” And so I would say that, when we learn to move past… when we stop seeing our humanity through gnostic lens of, “Hey, let's just get rid of that,” and when we remember that that God has created our embodied lives in a tangible, created world that really does locate us, we’re going to now receive these limits of time and place, not just obstacles to endure, but as vehicles for our sanctification and our growth and even our joy in the godness of God and in us being made in His image.

And let me just say this: Even think about the fact that one day… eternal life isn't going to be this disembodied, ethereal, let's get rid of our humanity. No, it's going to be a glorified humanity and a glorified creation and world, and the resurrection of Jesus is going to come down upon us and the whole created order. And so that reminds us, there's coming a day where time as we know is going to be unlimited and place as we know it is going to be uncursed, and so we live in the limits now, knowing that the fullness of those realities is still on the way.

Well said, well said, and you know there is a freedom that comes with—I'm going to use the word—embracing these limits. But rather than seeing as limits is embracing these specifics that God has chosen to put us in. But there is a headwind, I think, at us, because our culture wants to talk about fame, more, “Look at how big this person's ministry is,” “Look at how many copies of his book have sold,” “Look at how he's been to so many places,” and that's oppressive, by the way, because, unless you've been everywhere and you've talked to all of the eight billion people on the planet, you fall short. Whereas, “No, this is where he's placed me, and this is the time, and so let me embrace it and enjoy it and be the best possible steward.” There's something energizing about that, rather than stifling.

Absolutely. We remember what the psalmist said in Psalm 31, “My times in your hands,” and that's a remarkable phrase. Not just my time as a whole, but the times within that time. Each of the seasons that make up that time, they are in Your hands. And so I've got it here in the screen in front of me. Psalm 31:14, “But I trust in you, O Lord.” And that's the battle, is learning to receive and trust God's godness in every season and place of life that we find ourselves in. “But I trust in you, O Lord. I say, ‘You are my God. My times are in your hands.’” And so, if we think this life is all there is, and even as believers, we don't believe that, but functionally we can live that way. And we can live as if we don't get to this or or accomplish that or whatever it is, then somehow we're missing out and somehow our lives have fallen short of some standard that we've made for ourselves that's more of a reflection of a godless worldview, of YOLO. You only live once, so just make the most of every single moment, because it's all going to go away eventually, but we actually, as believers, know this is the prelude, and the time that we're in matters, but it's pointing to something beyond itself. And there is a new creation. There is life with God in ages to come.

And when we actually make peace with that, we actually remember, “Okay, now I can be faithfully attentive to the things that God has said actually matter, attentive to Him, love for Him, attentive to one another, love for neighbor, attentive to the place we inhabit, that particular place, which again, those are the three things in Eden that Zack Eswine does a great job of pointing this out in his book, The Imperfect Pastor. Love for God, love for others, in a place, that is a great life. And so we need to learn to redefine greatness, even, to what God says is a great thing.

People won't be surprised to hear me say I love C.S. Lewis. My favorite C.S. Lewis book is The Screwtape Letters, which tells you something about me. My favorite of The Screwtape Letters is Letter 15, where he talks about time, and he says, “The humans live in time, but our enemy, God, destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things: To eternity itself and to that point of time which they call the present, for the present is the point at which time touches eternity.” That has to be one of the most thought-provoking sentences I've ever puzzled over, “The present is that point that touches eternity.” And your musings about time and place in your book remind me of that. Say more about… you have a whole chapter about chronos and kairos. Talk about that a little bit. What's the difference? And why do we need to have a good handle on both of those?

Well, I think the first thing I need to say I’m a little upset we didn't have this conversation a year and a half ago, when I wrote this book, because that's a great quote by C.S. Lewis, and I wish I included it now. That is beautiful! Can you say it one more time, just so I can riff on that.

Sure. But you really don't want to quote Lewis too much, because then people get more amused or amazed at his writing than yours, so you don't want that.

That’s going to happen anyway. That’s fine.

Okay. I will read it again. Well, this is Screwtape, and he's trying to mess up this Christian. He's trying to get him to be a mess and to be far away from God, and so what he's saying is that, we, as tempers, we want to get the humans to either be caught up with the future or the past, but not the present. So he precedes this, before he said, “Are we trying to decide between the future or the past?” He said, “Well, tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of the mind, for us, for the tempers.” But then he says, “The humans live in time, but our enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the present, for the present is the point at which time touches eternity.”

Yeah, that's the line. Oh, I like that.

So for me, that is when I'm not jumping ahead to the future or remembering nostalgically about the past, when I’m staying in the present, that’s when it seems that God is most real to me. Because He’s here right now, right in this moment. Whereas in the future, it’s like, “Well, I don't know. I mean, is he going to come through for me?” And in the past, it's, “Well, am I really remembering it right?” or whatever. But in the present, here He is, right here, right now, blessing. Jesus is praying for…. here. I don't know. Jesus is praying for our podcast right now.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s wonderful! It's amazing! Anyway, I should let you talk

Well, no, I love the idea there, of that point there, where eternity breaks into the present. The Greeks had two words for time. There was chronos, which is clock time, quantified time, the measured sense of the ticking and sequence of events throughout lived existence. And then there's kairos, and kairos isn't about clock time or quantified time, it’s about the right time. Or we could even use the word ripeness, like a ripe mango, or a ripeness, the fullness of a moment that’s just the perfect moment, infused with life and light and joy and a sense of, “This is the way things are meant to be.” I think those moments where we experience the present, and more than just the present, we experience God in the present, we’re getting a foretaste of the fullness of life that's still coming our way. And so even one way we can maybe stop thinking about eternal life incorrectly, is we often think of eternal life purely through the lens of chronos, of life that just doesn't end, life that's unpunctuated by death. And that's a great thing. But I think eternal life, or again, ripeness, fullness of life, is more than that. It's not just unending sequence of events, but it's perpetual fullness, kairos, ripeness that doesn't diminish, but only ever increases in our experience of present time in eternity future. So I love that thought now of the present is eternity breaking in. It's the kingdom of God breaking in in very, very real ways. And what we're learning each day is to be attentive to that and to know that there is so much of God's glory and God's goodness that we’re surrounded by every single day, if we'll be willing to not rush past it and to be attentive to what matters in those moments.

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Hmm. You know, you touched on a gratefulness or gratitude or being thankful in the moment. I think that that's a very, very helpful moment-by-moment discipline, of being grateful for this, this very thing here, this moment, the time of day, the amount of sunshine, the whatever. Can you give us some more? If I can jump ahead to practical tips, how do we practice this kind of faithful presence?

Look, I think gratitude is so key. And another way we can talk about that is the language Paul uses around contentment. He talks about it in Philippians 4. He goes, “I have learned the secret of contentment. I know how to abound, and I know how to be brought low.” He’s saying, “I know how to be in a season of life where everything is just incredible, and I know how to be in a season of life where I'm getting beat up, put in jail, betrayed, everything going sideways for me,” and he goes, “I can do all things,” either abounding or being brought low, “through Christ who strengthens me.” And that sense—there's two things there. I think one is gratitude, like you said, and two is living out of a sense of our union that we have with Christ, that He is with us, not even just in every where, but in every when of our lives. And there’s never going to be a time or a place that he is not in the life of the believer, and that includes our present moment. It includes our future. So all of our anxieties that worry what about this? What about that? We're usually imagining a future absent of the presence of Jesus. Where it’s like He said, I will be with you always, even to the end of age.

So I think when we learn to practice living out of our union with Christ, that's where a lot of the gratitude will flow from. And so, practically, you asked that question. I'd recommend three things, and I have a chapter in the book around pauses, learning to take those selah moments there, where we stop and reflect and give thanks. We’re being thoughtful now about the time that we have in our lives. And there's three ways that I try to practice those kinds of pauses. There's the daily, there's the weekly, and there's the strategically throughout the year.

So, real quick: Daily, I have a couple of reminders in my phone, three in fact, at the end of the morning, at the end of the afternoon, and at the end of the evening, and I'll just have a little reminder come up in my phone that says, “Selah,” which for me I understand to mean pause and reflect. It’s that word we see throughout the Psalms. And what it lets me do is it lets me break my day down into manageable moments, the morning, the afternoon, and the evening, and to, at the end of each of those, just take even if it's a minute or a couple of minutes to just pause, to stop speaking, to reflect, to give thanks for what was, to confess my need, to confess sin, to come to Jesus again and remember He is with me through the morning and He will be with me through the rest of the day to come. And it's just a little reminder that reorients me to my union with Christ and that lived reality of my union with Christ. So I have selah moments throughout the day there.

The second one is practicing Sabbath rest, and there's so much we could say about this, but just that principle of a 24-hour period of time that we carve out in the week to not so much be producing but to receive life, to worship, to give thanks, to eat good food, to pray, to read our Bibles, to enjoy creation, to enjoy the best of our friendships and relationships and things that we have with our spouses or children in this world, and to simply abide in God the Creator and in the good creation that He’s put us in, knowing that I am not—and this is another Wendell Berry thing. I am not a machine. And the great temptation for the future, Berry writes, is that we will either live as machines or we will live as creatures, and we've got to decide which one we're going to live as. So I know I'm not a machine, and I need to embrace creatureliness by resting and by resting first and foremost in God.

And then strategically throughout the year, I practice and I encourage Christians, and I know it'll look different in every life stage of our lives, but to try and find a way to strategically withdraw, whether it's for a day or a couple of days, to just simply get away from your normal rhythms of life and be alone with God. And this is Jesus going up the mountain to spend time with the Father, to pray, to seek the Father's face, to withdraw from the crowds for the sake of re-entering meaningfully into ministry amongst the crowds and amongst the relationships that mark so much of life. And so learning to see solitude and silence as part of the spiritual disciplines that we can cultivate. And this is what some of the desert farmers talked about was solitude isn't so much just being alone. It's being alone with God. Silence isn't just the absence of words. It's meditating on God's words. And so where we frame it in that sense, it's not just this kind of ascetic life. It's a sense of communion once again, of being faithfully present, first to God, then to others, and then to the places that we live in.

Oh, man! I love your phrase of these selah moments. You’re right. That word shows up in a bunch of the psalms, and it's meant to be a statement of, “Pause here. Don't keep reading. Stop.” I think some people think that it may have been also a cue for the musician to play a little bit on the lute or the harp or something. Before you go on with words, just meditate. I love that! I love that idea. Selah moments.

Yeah.

You know, I took up this hobby of photography a little while ago. And, first of all, there's something really fun about the fact that I'm not trying to succeed. I'm not trying to get famous for my photos. People get tired of looking at them. “Hey, let me show you-” “No. Never mind.” So I'm doing it for enjoyment. But there's a skill that I need to develop, and that, when you go to photography workshops, it's you stare at things more intently, and you look, and, “Is this the angle I want to take the picture? Or is this the angle?” or, “Is it a wide-angle shot? Or is it a zoomed in shot?” and, “Notice where the light is coming from.” And so it's forced me, even when I'm not taking pictures, just to be more visually aware. And it's had also kind of a spiritual effect of just being more aware of God is here, and He’s in the midst of this circumstance.

Yeah.

So it's the visual that is pushing me in that direction, the way you're also saying about silence and quiet and rhythms. I love this. This is great. Say more. Give us another couple of, maybe one or two, practical tips in this.

Yeah. So I love that you do that. I mean I'm no photographer. My oldest daughter, she’s a great photographer. It’s one of her hobbies. And again that habit that you said there, what it does is it's teaching attentiveness, which really is another way of saying faithful presence. Attentiveness, being attentive to the light, being attentive to the colors and the movements and the shades, and the macro level and the micro level of things, and, Randy, I think that's what a worshipful life looks like. We’re not just hurried and blurred through our life, but we're walking at the pace of the Spirit through our days, being attentive to what God has for us in each of those days, with the people and the creative world that we live in. So I would—another little habit I guess I try to do, and this is just one for me, so people can take it or leave it. I try to make it a point to not be doing anything in those moments where the sun's going down. And that'll change depending on the time of the year. But for me, that's a moment that really grounds me in my creatureliness and deepens in me a sense of awe and wonder and a healthy slowing down towards the end of the day and the beginning of the evening, is I'll try to just, wherever I am, stop and—because you only get like ten to twenty minutes maybe of where the colors come into the sky and the reds and the orange and the pinks, and it's all now changing, and it's this kind of sacred moment, and there's no two sunsets exactly alike, and the way the clouds interact there, and for me to just stop at the end of the day and to watch the colors in the sky change and to let my heart just watch God through that. And if I'm with someone, to invite them into that, like, “Hey, just stand here with me.” And I'm just standing there like an idiot looking into the sky, but enjoying what God is doing in that moment. And it's a chance to pause, be still, and give thanks for the day that was. And so that's a little personal one is I'll try to drink in the colors every evening.

I love it! I love it! You're changing my calendar tremendously. This is great. You know, years ago, my wife and I and my brother and his wife got to have a vacation in Hawaii. One of his friends owned this house and let us use this house for free, and we got there, and there was this little book there of insights about the island and where we were, the restaurants to go to, the grocery store that was worth going to, and different nice places to go hiking, but then he had a whole entire page of a list of the best places to watch the sunset.

I love that.

And we thought, “Wow!” I mean a whole page of this, and sure enough he was right. I mean we went to the first one the first night and said, “Okay, we are doing this every night.” And sure enough… I mean big crowds of people would come, and they set up their chairs, and they would just stop, and there was sort of a little bit of a party atmosphere beforehand, so people had drinks, and they're talking and chatting. But then when, it got to time when the sun was getting low, it was just perfect silence, and everybody just stood there, and when the sun finally dipped below the horizon, people burst into applause. And I thought-

I love that!

… “I love this!” So your idea. I’ve got do this. Now, I mean Austin, Texas, is not Hawaii, and it's not the Gold Coast, is that what you call it? of Australia? It's one of the most-

Yeah, that’s right.

… beautiful places in the world.

Exactly right. Yeah.

So you're watching your sunsets there. Well, wait a minute, wouldn't you be watching more your sunrises? They're probably all gorgeous.

Well, it depends. So the sunrise coming up over the ocean, and then the sun sets over the hills in the hinterland behind us. But listen, I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, which is not too far from you, and there were some stunning sunsets. I mean just some of the reds in that Texas sky as the day ended and the evening began was breathtaking. And that's the thing. It’s different everywhere in the world. There's different colors and beauty in those moments, and the point of it, I think, is to remind us that this is God's world, and we have been gifted with the life that we have, and we've been gifted with this incredible gift called today, and no one is promised tomorrow. We may or may not receive that gift. God is gracious, and He gives us many tomorrows. But what we have right now is today. And the sunset for me is a marker that reminds me today has been a gift. Thank you, God, for this gift.

I love that! I love that! That is so helpful. Well, I think that's a good place for us to draw this to a close, although I want to talk for hours and hours. Maybe this is a bad way to end. This could be trouble. We could edit this out. Do you have to wrestle with, do you wrestle, have you ever wrestled with, “If I'm going to do these things, it means I'm going to accomplish less.” I mean, if you're taking twenty minutes out of your day, every day, just to look at the sunset, you're writing fewer books. You're reading fewer books. Was that ever a struggle? It would almost seem to me that maybe it was a struggle, but then it was like, “Oh! That’s okay. It’s gone. All right.” A release. Or is it a struggle? I don’t know. Is that for you?

Randy, it was a struggle, it is a struggle, it will be forever a struggle until Jesus comes back and removes all struggle, and I think it was Luther who was quoted as saying—it's the same concept as, “I have so much work to do, I have to pray for two hours this morning.” It's like it doesn't make sense, but also there’s a reality where the kind of person that I'm going to be, each day of my life and at the end of my life, is shaped by the way that I spend time. Again, that’s why we use even the language of spending time. Time is the currency of life. It is precious to us. That's why we try to save as much time as we can, and that’s why we spend it. But if I'm going to spend time, I need to spend it in a way that matters. And so much of the busyness of what the world tells me, “This is the mattering life,” actually, it doesn't matter as much as some of the other overlooked things. And what I’ve learned from being a pastor for the last nearly twenty years now is that, when people are dying and they're coming to the final moments of their time, and they're thinking back on the days and the years that God gave them, they’re generally not thinking about how much they accomplished. They’re generally not thinking about how much achievement and degrees, and they're not usually thinking about their vocation and a sense of, “Oh, I could have put in some more effort there in my work,” or things like that. What they’re usually thinking about is the people, the state of the relationships that they have, the state of their own soul, and that relationship they have before God.

And when we slow down—and I used the phrase before on purpose. When we slow down enough to live at the Spirit’s pace in our lives, we might get less done, less boxes ticked off perhaps, but we will find ourselves becoming more Christlike, more attentive, more peaceful. And if we look at the life of Jesus, never once do we see Jesus in a hurry. There’s not a single scripture where Jesus is rushed and hurried and frenetic, trying to get more done. In fact, if anything, there's moments where He surprises us with His slowness and He surprises us with, like, “Hey, Lazarus is dead.” “All right. I'll be there in a few days,” and He gives no reason why He delays. Right? And when He’s on his way to heal the little girl who's sick, and He’s getting stopped along the way, and a woman touches his robe, and she's got the issue with blood, and He’s like, “Who touched me?” And Peter’s like, “Everyone’s touching you. What are you talking about, Jesus?” and Jesus stops from going to the other thing to be attentive to what was happening there in that moment with this one woman. And I think what Jesus is showing us is that, when we walk at the Spirit’s pace, we're going to see even the interruptions that happen along the way as part of God's good design for teaching us to be present to the time and times and places that we find ourselves and to realize that our plan isn't His plan. And it doesn't mean we can't have a plan, but His plan is the one that is the life we do live, not the life we think we ought to live. And that’s really what the whole book is about, learning to make peace with that and to live the given life and not necessarily the planned life.

Well said, well said! Well, let's bring this to a close, as much as that's painful for me. But I need to go watch a sunset soon.

Good move!

My guest has been Adam Ramsey. His book is called Faithfully Present. It’s really, really insightful. If you enjoyed listening to what he's had to say, you'll want to dig into this book. I'll put links on the show notes, of course. I think we'll even try to connect to your church, so people can get a little more of an idea of your everyday ministry. And let me invite our listeners to check out resources that we have on our website, cslewisinstitute.org. We hope that all of our resources, this podcast, all of our resources, help you live faithfully present, embracing the limits of where God has placed you in the here and now. Thanks.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman