Right here. Right now.

Here is the number one gift I can give my wife. Be with her. Easy to say, hard to do. Not hard because she is hard to be with. Quite the contrary, there is no better day than one spent with her. I am the problem. I have a hard time just being with her because there are so many other places to be and so many distractions.

It is nearly impossible to be here now when you think there is somewhere else to be. -Guru Singh

The times that this phenomenon has become painfully obvious to me has been when our married friends have stopped being in their marriage because they were somewhere else. Often they were with someone else (real or imagined). Being with someone and imagining yourself somewhere else is not really being there.

More often, I intend to be with my wife and just her, when I let myself get carried off by the ding telling me I have a text message or some other nonsense. My body is still there but I’ve checked out – fantasizing about what important news might be in that text (after all, I might have won that lottery I’ve never entered).

I quote Guru Singh because his language is so clean. Also, Zig Ziglar had a whole work on this idea wherein he explained that many people were unhappy and tired because they traveled so much. When they were at work they wanted to be home and when they were home they wanted to be at work. They were never where they were, always traveling (in their mind) to someplace else. To the married evangelical, read Song of Solomon and ask it about being present in your relationship.

Try this. Give the gift of being present. It might even help to say it out loud, “For the next three hours, I am in the right place (here), with the right person (you), at the right time (now).”

And after you say it, the greatest gift is doing it. Be right here. Right now.