I think you miss my point....
Everything you look at is from the past...
You literally do not know what is happening out there today, nor can you know, because that light wont reach us until way into the future.
You look out and observe the universe is expanding...that is news from the past...you cant get news of what is happening now...it is impossible as light has a finite speed....if a gallaxy is one billion light years away (in this context it is a distance measurement ... it is how far light travells in one billion years) ...that gallaxy was one billion light years distant when the light we observe today reaches us that light is one billion years old...that gallaxy in real time may be far removed from where we o serve it today...in fact it could have literally disappeared 900,000 years ago as a result of being cleared for a cosmic super highway or all consumed by its central now extremely massive back hole and we will not know until another 100,000 years.
If a supernova went off today in M31 the Andromeda Gallaxy we will not see such an explosion until 2 to 2.5 million years from now...light years is distance but it also means how long it has taken for the light we receive to reach us.
So all our observations show an expanding universe but it literally may have stopped expanding and is contracting...its very important to understand that the light we see shows nothing of what is happening today it shows how it was....the cosmic background radiation is light that is approximately 13.5 billion years old ...we may record it today but it left its source 13.5 billion years ago.
Alex