The Days We Assume Are Already Ours
A small moment while booking a holiday made me think about how easily we take the future for granted.
Welcome to Saturday’s reflection.
Paid subscribers receive a new reflection each weekday, offering a few minutes to pause, think and explore where faith meets ordinary life. My hope is that each one leaves you with something worth carrying into the rest of your day.
Some readers have told me they also enjoy having these reflections away from the screen, which is one reason I also collected them into a paperback: Sacred & Secular: Finding God in the Ordinary. Amazon UK or USA..
I have just started booking a family break for July 2027. In fact, the booking page is still open in another browser tab as I write this.
I do not normally organise holidays quite so far in advance, but this one involves meeting up with wider family, so dates need to be agreed and accommodation found before everyone’s diaries begin filling up. I sailed through most of the booking process without thinking very much about it. Choose the dates. Choose the accommodation. Check the price. Decide whether we need towels, bedding and all the other things holiday companies somehow manage to turn into opportunities for an extra charge.
Then I reached the final page.
Did I want to add cancellation insurance?
Normally, I would click no almost automatically. Insurance often feels like one of those extra expenses slipped in at the end of a booking, alongside various other things I have already convinced myself I can live without. Most of the time, I would rather keep the money and take my chances.
But this time I hesitated.
July 2027 is nearly a year away. A great deal can happen between now and then, particularly when you live with a chronic condition. Suddenly, paying a little extra to insure something happening eleven months from now did not seem quite so unnecessary.
What caught my attention, though, was not really the insurance.
It was the assumption behind the booking itself.
Without giving it a second thought, I had been clicking through each page as though July 2027 were already mine. I was choosing where we would stay, imagining the family gathering and making arrangements for days that do not yet exist. I was effectively spending money on a version of the future that I had already begun to picture.
Of course, there is nothing particularly foolish or strange about that. We have to make plans. Life would become rather difficult if none of us arranged anything beyond next Tuesday. We book holidays, organise weddings, schedule appointments, buy theatre tickets and make plans to see people months in advance. Most of the time, those plans work out perfectly well.
Yet there is something revealing about how naturally we do it.
We say, next summer we will… or when we go away… or this time next year… as though the future were simply another room waiting for us to walk into.
And that made me think about something Jesus once said about Sodom.
