Written By Kelly Marie Trust
@kellymariefitmom
My hopes used to sit in my forever.
My baptism was a forever promise to follow Christ. It was the beginning of my forever path towards eternal salvation.
My family was a forever family that was unbreakable by the world. I fortified that connection by strictly following the guidelines my parents taught me were what would guard our forever.
Brigham Young University was going to prepare me for forever. I entered to learn expecting to go forth and serve much stronger here on earth to prepare me for forever.
My marriage was a sealing that would last forever. Maybe it would be perfect in the forever.
My dreams sat in an eternity promised to me by a God I prayed to daily.
In focusing on forever I lost the now.
My happiness right now.
My relationships right now.
My life right now.
I was always waiting for the next phase that would guarantee me forever.
Returning to now was hard. A cold forest. My darkest night involved me choosing to search out the parts of my soul that I planned on fixing in the forever. Forgetting that they were killing me now.
Slowly I have untangled the forever and fought and crawled my way back to now. No one could really help me get here - to where I am now. It doesn’t work that way.
But if you want to actually see the light, you have to know the dark. And embracing now and forever and the past and the future and the present. All of them. It’s hard.
All of the things I planned on having in the forever honestly…sucked right now.
Getting out of the ties that were supposed to give me forever HURT.
Getting out of my marriage that I planned on being forever was painful.
Separating myself from my childhood religion felt like cutting my soul in half.
Leaving the family that was supposed to accept me now and forever… I don’t have the words for that type of pain. If you’ve been there, you know it.
What I realized though is that I needed to go through that pain to reclaim my now. My happiness. My idea of family. It’s not about forever anymore.
What am I doing right now to be the best I can be? Where is my family right now? Who stayed with me through the pain in this life? Who sat in the dark with me? Not the people I expected. Or even wanted. God. I wanted my Mother and Father there in those times. But they could not handle my pain with me. They asked me to keep it to myself. If there was any prayer I needed answered it was to not be alone. But the God I was taught about growing up did not keep His forever promises.
Now I ask the universe, or whatever greater power is out there, to help those who only have eyes for the future and are blind to the now. Help them see the present pain that can be relieved simply through understanding and sometimes difficult conversations that need to happen now. Not later. Forever is not promised but this moment right now is. As one of my guides of being present, Eckhart Tolle, tells me, “Belief in a future heaven creates a present hell.”
Every day is heaven for me. I get to choose it. It’s different every day and nothing like the life I dreamed of growing up.
It’s way more beautiful than I ever could have imagined.
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