I teach at a K-8 school, which means that our 8th grade students are inevitably distracted by the pressing and significant reality of choosing a new school.  A few years back one of my 8th graders said to me, “I feel like all anyone ever wants to talk about is ‘what’s next.'”  He was living in that difficult tension between wanting to play a responsible role in his high school selection process and wanting to be a 13-year-old kid enjoying his last year at a school he had been a part of for 10 years.

Life moves on for this kid, and for all of us, but this tension just finds a new manifestation in a new season.

I really like the way C.S. Lewis addresses this issue of man’s regard for “the Future” in The Screwtape Letters.  Once again we have the demon Screwtape writing to his protege Wormwood:

“It is far better to make [men] live in the Future.  Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear.  Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities.  In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity . . . To be sure, [God] wants men to think of the Future too – just so much as it is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow.  The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present.  This is now straw splitting.  He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We [demons] do.  [God’s] ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him.”

“The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity.”  I just can’t get that line out of my head.