It takes impossible work to make the world spin. But that didn’t keep me from trying. My try-hard life was made up of either trying to manage outcomes of things that would happen in the future, or trying to make up for things in the past. Fix and prevent, fix and prevent.

Regret pulled me into yesterday while worry pushed me hard into tomorrow. I lived a lot of life stuck between two competing anxieties, pulling and pushing. There is always a jerking in worry, a restless moving from one thing to the next, ever stuck in the past or the future. But what about the blessed now?

I am believing more and more that we are called only to the holy right now. Because this is the only time we have to either live the dream or wish it away, to rejoice and be glad or fear and be bitter. We can will the world to spin faster or stop, or we can rest in the one who holds the world in his hands.

And so that tug-of-war between yesterday and tomorrow can only go on as long as we hold on to the rope. If you stop playing the game, Worry and Regret have to find somewhere else to play.

“God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.” (Eph. 3:20 MSG)

By Emily Freeman, author of Grace for the Good Girl, and the blog, Chatting at the Sky.