“But behold, the Jews were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, they must needs fall; for God hath taken away his plainness from them, and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand, because they desired it. And because they desired it God hath done it, that they may stumble.” (Jacob 4:14). Jacob says that we can get into trouble by “looking beyond the mark.” For an eternal being such as our Heavenly Father, all things are present to His view. Past, present and future are all available to Him simultaneously. For those of us whose vision is constricted by linear time, we can't quite wrap our heads around this. But we try. We try conjuring up visions of the future or recollections of the past while we are still in the present. But our minds can only hold onto so many things at a time. We might like to have past, present and future in front of us all at the same time, but we can't manage it. And so, although we are entirely capable of being fully present in the present moment, we abandon that sense of clarity and purpose and absorption in favor of looking beyond our current challenge or situation to what might come next. We get bored and frustrated and impatient when our visions of the future don't materialize as quickly as we would like them to. In fact, we may be tempted to cut corners or compromise our integrity in order to usher in that future more quickly. But as much as we would like to believe that we can accurately imagine the best possible future for ourselves, we cannot. We don't have all of the facts. We don't know what tomorrow might bring, although we can be sure that in our haste to reach it, we may run blindly into some obstacle that we could not see, leading us to stumble and fall. It is hard, but we have to learn to content ourselves with today and take no thought for tomorrow and not look beyond the mark. We just need to do the most important thing that is right in front of us. As Anna sings in Frozen 2 “I won't look too far ahead, It's too much for me to take, But break it down to this next breath, This next step, This next choice is one that I can make, So I'll walk through this night, Stumbling blindly toward the light, And do the next right thing, And with the dawn, what comes then, When it's clear that everything will never be the same again? Then I'll make the choice To hear that voice And do the next right thing. I know that our greatest chance for peace and happiness in this life comes not from looking beyond the mark to what comes next but keeping laser focused directly on the mark and doing the next right thing.
