Embracing Mindfulness: Cultivating Peace Through Acceptance

In this Advent season, we are invited to celebrate Jesus' kingship with a spirit of radical acceptance, particularly of our own minds. Often, we find ourselves impatient with our thoughts, filled with temptations, worries, and inadequacies. However, our minds are gifts from God, and we are called to accept them as they are. This acceptance is not passive but involves preparing our minds to receive the peace and thoughts God wants to sow in us. [00:00:27]

Dallas was talking about a parable that Jesus told you might be familiar with, where it's the story of a sower that goes out to sow some seed and the sower sows lots of seed and some of it falls on different kinds of soil. Some of the soil is rocky, and some of it is on a path where it's pressed down, and some of it has thorns. Some of it is receptive; it's soft, it's open. [00:01:27]

God is sending out thoughts, his word, thoughts of love, thoughts of joy, thoughts of peace, thoughts of beauty, thoughts of inspiration, all the time from one moment to the next moment in the beauty of this world, in the faces and lives of people that are around us, in the story of scripture and great lines that we can read in tasks that we can do. [00:02:46]

Will the soil of my mind be open, receptive to this thought, to God saying to me, John, I love you, John, I have a purpose for you, John, you don't need to worry about the future, you don't need to worry about the people that you love, I care for all of them, you don't need to live in anxiety of death. [00:03:23]

Mindfulness is a capacity to be fully aware of what's happening in this present moment, particularly self-aware. That is, I'm aware internally, am I feeling anxious or upset or angry? So full awareness of what's happening in this present moment, particularly self-aware, in a spirit of non-condemning detachment. [00:05:40]

In Christ, now there is no condemnation as we think about the thoughts and the feelings that come our way, which we cannot control. And actually, my own sense of shame or self-condemnation will often keep me from being fully aware of, oh yeah, I have this desire, or I have this fear. [00:06:24]

Mindfulness is the capacity to be fully aware of what's going on in this present moment. I'm not preoccupied, I'm not mindless. Ellen Langer was one of the first people to write about this, and she talks about how the opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness when we just go on autopilot. [00:06:42]

I believe that what in our culture we talk about as mindfulness, in the Bible is called peace. The mind set on the spirit is life and peace, and in Christian history is actually called practicing the presence of God. And if you read that little book by Brother Lawrence, of course, he does not use the word mindfulness. [00:08:09]

I accept my mind, you accept your mind, and when I become aware of thoughts of resentment or fear of missing out or greed or lust or judgment on other people, I don't condemn myself for them. Now in Christ, there is no condemnation. When I become aware of them, I don't have to be attached to them anymore. [00:09:36]

I am not them, they are not me, I just let them go, and I gently bring my mind back to the reality that Jesus is with me right now, and the sower is sowing the seed in simply that thought, John, I am with you, peace I give to you, my peace I give to you. [00:09:51]

The sower is sowing seeds every moment. Today, God, would you plow the soil of my mind and let the seed take root from one moment to the next. Would your peace guard my mind, receive peace, accept your mind as the place where the presence of God will be known. [00:10:09]

How do I plow up the soil of my mind? How do I make it receptive so that instead of just clinging to anxious, resentful, fearful, ego-driven thoughts, I'm from one moment to the next responsive to the seed that's being sown by God in my mind? [00:04:09]