Present, But Not Accounted For

There's a conversation my husband and I have had more than once. With a little. frustration, he'll ask how I could not know how he feels about me…and then he'll look at me with a side glance and a tone filled with sarcasm to say, "I'm here, aren't I?"

And I'll wrinkle my face at him and say…so? That doesn't mean anything. You can be here and not here at the same time. (God bless him for putting up with me.)

But it took me a lot longer to notice that I've been saying the same thing. Not to him — to everyone. Someone asks how I'm doing, and I say, 'I'm here.' I'm present. And it sounds like an answer…it even sounds like a good one.

It wasn't much later that I was able to recognize and hold space for what I was actually communicating.

I was present, but not accounted for.

See, I was physically there. But I felt overlooked, omitted, not factored in, dismissed…and without a reason to attach to any of it. So I stayed in the room and called that enough.

We do something similar with our inner lives, and we've found language for it that sounds like maturity. I'm trusting God with the outcome. I'm just focusing on what's in front of me right now. In theory, that sounds good. And it may even be true that we're focused on the present 'moment' — but we're not fully present. Because presence goes far beyond the people and circumstances around us. Presence also holds space for the tension between what's happening around us and what's going on inside of us.

Sometimes "I'm focusing on the present" isn't a discipline at all. Sometimes it's a way around the grief.

Around the diagnosis. Around a future that may no longer look like the one we imagined. Around a dream that's on its deathbed while we're still talking about it in present tense. We bypass the reality of all of it and say…well, God knows.

He does. That was never the question.

And if bypassing were the holy thing to do, Gethsemane would look very different.

36 Then Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and he said,“Sit here while I go over there to pray.” 37 He took Peter and Zebedee’s two sons, James and John, and he became anguished and distressed. 38 He told them,“My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” 39 He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying,“My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”

After reading this passage, I noticed not only what was there, but what wasn't. Jesus approaches without seemingly adjusting His face nor softening words. He doesn't hand the Father a summary. He tells three friends that His soul is overwhelmed to the point of death, and He asks them to stay…and then He goes a little farther and says the honest thing out loud, more than once, before He ever says yet not as I will.

The surrender comes. But it comes after He names what it costs Him — not instead of it.

Somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that naming the emotions is the disrespectful part. That real faith skips ahead to the yielding, but never feeling. But the most present person who ever lived didn't skip anything, and the Father never corrected Him for it.

Presence isn't pretending that the inside matches the outside. It's telling the truth about the unspoken gap between them.

Being fully present is harder than being physically available, which is probably why we settle for the second one and call it the first. It asks us to notice the tension instead of narrating around it. To let 'I'm here' actually mean something. To bring the grief we've been stepping over into the room with us — and then into the presence of God, who has never once needed us to show up already put together.

He isn't asking us to be okay. He's asking us to be here…all of us, accounted for.

Where have you been saying "I'm here" when what you really meant was something else?

#presence