Mindfulness

“…There’s more to this life than living and dying, more than just trying to make it through the day.” Stephen Curtis Chapman

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” So spoke the great ancient philosopher Socrates. In so speaking, he offered a stirring challenge to simply traveling through life on autopilot.

What is the unexamined life? The unexamined life is failing to ask and reflect on the big questions: What is the purpose of my life (why am I here)? What can I count on? What is truth, goodness, and beauty? How can I become a truly good person? The unexamined life is one in which the tyranny of the urgent pushes out the things that are lastingly important. The unexamined life fails to make any connections between what a person does today and what that person may become tomorrow. Simon and Garfunkel describe this in their song “Slip Sliding Away:” “We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay, believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away.”

In the card game of Spades, there are two ways to score points: one is to bid high and successfully capture the number of hands you bid; the other is to bid nello and not take any hands. By the time many people reach middle-adulthood, the idealistic dreams of youth have been supplanted by strategies for surviving and existing. In Spades terminology, they are simply playing nello in the game of life: they are working their jobs, paying their bills, avoiding hassles and inconveniences, living for the weekend or their next vacation, and killing time until time kills them.

One of the great gifts that a season like our 40-Day Spiritual Adventure offers us is the opportunity to become more self-reflective and mindful of our lives. Paul Simpson Duke writes that, “Lent’s purpose, in large measure, is to interrupt our self-absorption, lassitude, acquiescence, numbing entertainments, resigned despair, and all else that reduces our existence to sleepwalking. It wants to sling the cold waters of our baptism across our faces and awaken us to our position.” In other words, Lent offers us the gift of self-examination in the honest light of the cross and the tender mercies of Christ.

I urge you to expend the extra effort during these 40 days to live a better-examined life. Such a life is characterized by self-reflection, prayerful reliance upon God, humble repentance and confession of sins, amendment of wrongdoings, reconciliation of estrangements, generous sharing, and gracious hospitality. May we refuse to settle for going through the motions of life without mindful engagement. Instead, may we live consciously and gratefully in the lengthening light of God’s cross-shaped wisdom.

Love in Christ,


Andy