Word of Encouragement (1/12/2021)

Yesterday, I put forth a difficult challenge for you to pray longer—not for the sake of simply praying longer, repeating yourself over and over again, which is what Jesus told us not to do, but for the sake of “ascending” through the overcast clouds of distraction to reach the clear, blue sky of tranquility and clarity of spirit for a fully engaged communion with God. When you get there, you don’t want to stop praying because there is such a profound sense of peace and joy coming from the presence of God. Have you experienced it in your prayer life—a time of prayer so sweet that you don’t want it to ever stop and you are sad because you have to stop to do other things that God has called you to do? To go through one’s entire Christian life without ever experiencing a moment like that is tragic, especially because Jesus made it available for all of His people through His suffering, death, and resurrection!

Pay attention to what I just said. What we do in prayer avails us nothing unless Jesus provided our access to the throne of God’s grace through His death and resurrection. Christian prayer is fundamentally different from mindfulness. I say fundamentally different because the sense of tranquility and clarity we experience in that sweet hour of prayer may experientially be quite similar to what people want to achieve through mindfulness. But how are they different?

“Mindfulness is a type of meditation in which you focus on being intensely aware of what you’re sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment” (Mayo Clinic). As you can see, it is all about us—being mindful of what we are sensing, thinking, and feeling. How is prayer different? Not in the sense that we don’t care about being mindful of ourselves. After all, prayer in its simple definition is offering up of our desires to God. We can even say that we become more mindful of ourselves in prayer than at other times and in other activities because we are offering up our deepest desires to God. But this is only half of the story, at best. Prayer is not a monologue; it is more like a dialogue with God. When we are with someone special, interacting with him, we are intensely mindful of that person. And it is thus being in the presence of another that our self-awareness becomes even more heightened than when we are alone. In prayer, we reach a higher level of self-awareness than in mindfulness because we are mindful of being in the presence of God, with whom we are having communion.

So then, while the tranquility and clarity of mind we experience in mindfulness and in prayer may seem similar, they radically differ in their respective sources: in mindfulness, it is being in tune with ourselves and our environment; in prayer, it is being in communion with God, who is Love, Joy, Peace, etc. It is not by emptying our minds or filling our minds with ourselves; it is by filling our minds with God’s Word and viewing ourselves in light of His Word that we come to enjoy tranquility and clarity of vision—the tranquility that comes from God and the clarity of vision that comes from the truth of His Word. This is why it’s important to include in our prayer the praise of God for who He is and what He has done. In mindfulness, we crave tranquility and clarity. In prayer, we crave God, in whom we find all things.

Let us move beyond treating prayer like a business transaction, simply asking God to give us things. There is a place for that, of course. But let us not forget to seek God just for God, who ought to be the deepest and greatest desire of our hearts.

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