Blog 3252 – 09.27.2024

Mindfulness

Yesterday, I chose to write about how important it is that we deal with our heart troubles. Today I would like to spend a few moments dealing with mindfulness and specifically the trouble many of us have keeping focused or maintaining a long enough attention span to deal with the situations that we encounter daily.

We have, I fear, adopted shorter and less meaningful modes of communication not to save time because we think we have so little of it to waste, but because we are fearful that if we invest too much time and thought in this or that person that they will make further demands upon us. It would appear that mindlessness not mindfulness is the preferred state for most and that new friendships are shunned and older one not maintained and therefore lost to time and attention constraints.

Friendships take time and attention and a certain mindfulness. The only true remedy for carelessness is not to be more careful (full of cares) but to be more mindful of our situation and of others around us as we are of ourselves, i.e. “Love God and our neighbors (friends) as we love ourselves.”

If we truly wish to know and invest our time and attention in others, we must first get to know that friend that sticks closer than a brother, our self, our true self, our highest and best self. I am reminded of a New Testament verse that has come to mean far more to me than it did when I was trying to be a Christian. It goes: “Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus (literally “The Annointed Savior) who being found in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.”

Jesus said, “No greater love has any man than to lay down his life for his friends.” Look, your true friends are not asking you to die for them just to be mindful of your own life and their place in it. My mother used to have a motto hanging on the living room wall that read, “Just one life ‘twill soon be past, only what’s done for Christ shall last.” I would change but one word in that saying yet it is an important distinction. I would change the for in “for Christ” to as, making it read “Only what’s done as Christ shall last.” Being mindful of Who and Whose we truly are makes us the true and best friend of all mankind.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White