Pause for thought - Talking to your future self

Pause for thought - 28 September 2006

Talking to your future self

Last Saturday I had a brilliant day. The plan was to spend a whole two hours wandering around Salisbury Cathedral soaking in some of its history.

And what a history! It’s full of the powerful and the quaint.

Take Bishop Thomas Bennet for example. Bennet was a rather unusual tongue-in-cheek Bishop who paid a stonemason to build his tomb at his chosen spot in the Cathedral - before he actually died. “I can’t do that!” said the mason “I don’t know when you’ll die.”

“Oh make it 1554,” said Bennet, “I’m sure I shan’t live much longer than that!” The only problem was that old Bennet didn’t hang up his mitre and staff until 1558. So for 4 years the poor man was still alive when he was ‘officially’ dead!

I was thinking about this when I read about the services offered by the new website which enables you to send emails to yourself for the future. Since its launch two years ago, over 300,000 people have written in to post messages which they will pick up again in the future. If you want you can remind yourself to top up your pension plan in twenty years time, or wish yourself a Happy Birthday – in case everybody else forgets.

Some young soldiers have sent messages into the future – just in case they fail to return from battle.

However long it might last the future is everybody’s business. A person without a future is a person without a hope. As the old negro preacher put it “I aint the man I was and I ain’t the man I is gonna be.”

God himself is also committed to our futures. And whilst the future is always hard to pin down in the present, he’s always sending messages on ahead of us.

As he said of the Jewish people in exile, “I know the plans I have for you. They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”

I actually think it’s a great idea for us to talk to our future self. But if you haven’t stopped long enough to hear what God might have in mind, how will you know what to tell yourself?

Joel Edwards, General Director of rhte Evangelical Alliance UK