It is important to live each moment to the fullest, but it also just as important to be sure that we do not only live the the moment. Those who do not believe in an afterlife will almost certainly try to find purpose in the present. We/they, however, can only do this if we/they at least believe in the "after now." We have to believe in tomorrow to function well today. It is never enough [despite the posits of the existentialists, humanists, nihilists and hedonists] for us to simply exist, and if all we have is now, our souls will starve from lack of nourishment. Without a future there is no hope, and hope is essential for our souls to thrive. Hope exists only in the future, and if the future does not exist, there can be no hope. Our minds may work out an endless number of scenarios; our souls, however, are quite inflexible when it comes to this. Without hope there is only despair.
A sense of destiny is what we experience when we are filled with hope. And all of us are on a search for destiny. We all need to believe we have both a future and a hope. They are inseparably linked. And when there is no future, there is no hope. Where there is no hope, there is no reason to live.
Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream and he was killed for it. When we have no dream, it kills us. It is the same way with hope. Hope pulls us into the future. Yet as essential as hope is for life, we live in a world that seems determined to take it from us. Hope is rare and becoming rarer, but we don't need much of it to experience its power. We become filled with hope not because everything in the future is certain to us, but because the future itself is filled with promise.
At the same time, like the promise of the future, hope only comes from something we have not yet attained, something we do not yet have. In other words, how much we have presently in the world has little bearing on how much hope we have. The reality is that everything we have presently no longer qualifies as a conduit of hope, because once we have it, it falls out of the arena of hope.
Hope pulls us into the future because it comes from there. And while hope is connected to the future, it is impossible to live in the present without it. There is a simple reason for this. It is how God has designed us. Hope is the oxygen of the soul. We tend to take for granted the things that are the most obvious to us. Compare it to being worried about having enough money to pay our bills but never worrying about having enough air to breathe. In reality though, which one is more critical to life?
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