Be Mindful

Our daily activity sometimes causes us to miss the best moments in life. We get lost in our thoughts and fail to see God who is in our midst. In this episode of the Things Above podcast, James Bryan Smith shares a heavenly thought: Be mindful that God is with you in all you do. In his book, Discipline and Discovery, Albert Edward Day offers some words about God's presence with us: "Did you ever encounter, on the street, a friend whose physical eyes looked at you without seeing you? You walked right into him before the alien look on his face changed into one of recognition. Then he confessed that he had been so absorbed in thought about some other matters that he had not been aware of you, until your intentional collision with him. You were there, yet he did not see you. Though actually in your presence, he was nevertheless unconscious of you as if you did not exist. That is a persistent failure of the unemancipated consciousness. It can be so preoccupied with lesser realities that it does not sense the presence of the Divine reality surrounding and sustaining it. Something has to happen to end the absorption in other affairs so that it can turn its attention to God.” We can get preoccupied with “things below,” which impacts our relationship with God. We get caught up in the tyranny of an idea or a dream and release the awareness of something greater than the idea or dream, namely God Himself. So what can we do? Jim suggests that we can train ourselves to be aware of all we do and integrate a constant awareness of God by living on two levels. Quaker writer Thomas Kelley wrote about this in “A Testament of Devotion.” On one level, we can go about our daily tasks at hand – working, driving, reading, etc. On another level, we can include our attentiveness to the presence of God in our midst – intimate fellowship with Him. This is what makes life splendid. Have you been aware of God’s goodness, love and holiness lately? Experiment with this today or this week. Jot your experience down in a journal or notebook and reflect on what you observed.