How to Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living

by Rob Bell

When we don’t throw ourselves completely into it and we hold back our best efforts because of what happened in the past, we are letting the past decide the future.

We surrender the outcomes because we cannot control how people are going to respond to us and our work in the world.

You cannot control how people are going to respond to you and your work in the world.

Surrendering the outcomes is making peace with our lack of control over how people respond to us and our work.

Surrendering the outcomes is coming to terms with the freedom people have to react to us and our work however they want. Surrendering the outcomes is embracing the fact that there are no guarantees when it comes to results.

The joy comes from being fully present in this moment. The reward is in throwing yourself into it right here and now.

Details remind you who you are,

where you’ve been, and what your path is.

Our external environments mirror our internal lives.

That’s despair: when every day looks like every other day.

But when you begin practicing Sabbath, a day during which you don’t have a set schedule and you don’t have to be anywhere, you find yourself relating to time in a different way.

When you intentionally slow down, you instantly see how fast you’ve been moving the rest of the time.

Sabbath is when you spend a day remembering that efficiency and production are not God’s highest goals for your life. Joy is.

It built up from days and days of moving too quickly, absorbing all the pain and anguish the world throws at us that we don’t have time in the moment to think about and work through. It accumulates in our hearts, our cells, our psyches, expressing itself at the strangest times.

Sabbath forces you to listen to your life. Sabbath is a day when you are fully present to your pain, your

stress, your worry, your fear.

To live with rhythm requires that you be intentional about what you’re doing and when you’re doing it.

People didn’t used to have email inboxes. We have literally invented new ways to be stressed.

When is your cell phone on? When is it off? When can’t we get ahold of you? When don’t you answer your phone because you’re doing something?

all we have is the

present. All we have is today.

Find your rituals, develop your routines, create those practices that ground and center you.

There’s power there. Power in the details, power in the ritual, power in the routines, power in those plates.

I could only be present. And the

present was enough. It wasn’t just enough, it was more than enough. It was overwhelming. The burrito wasn’t just food, it was an explosion of sensation.

I learned that my life— my average, ordinary, routine, everyday life— has infinite depth and dimension and meaning and significance.

No one has ever done this before. No one has ever been you before.

This exact interrelated web of people and events and places and memories and desire and love that is your life hasn’t ever existed in the history of the universe. Welcome to a truly unique phenomenon.

I want you to be here. I want you to see and feel and notice and even enjoy your life, not just as you sit quietly, but as you go, as you work, as you answer email, as you are stuck in traffic, as you find your

path and throw yourself into it, surrendering the outcomes as you risk and learn and grow and work your craft, in the push and pull and stress and pain and sorrow and responsibility and slog of this sacred gift that is your life.

When you find yourself overwhelmed with all that is coming at you, take a deep breath and say to yourself, Just this.