Being Mindful of God

Our Sunday school class is studying Respectable Sins by Jerry Bridges.  I highly recommend it.  His basic premise is that, as Christians, we condemn “big sins” such as adultery or abortion, but we tolerate certain “respectable sins” in our own lives, such as worry, gossip, discontentment, pride, worldliness, etc.

The first so-called respectable sin Bridges discusses is ungodliness, which he defines as “living one’s every day life with little or no thought of God, or of God’s will, or of God’s glory, or of one’s dependence on God” (p. 54).  He writes, “Let us then seek to be as mindful of [God] as He is of us.”  This was very convicting for me, as I fear all of these chapters will be.  Psalm 139 tells us that God is extremely mindful of us.  He knows our every action, our every thought.  He created every cell in our bodies.  It makes sense that the creature should be just as mindful of the Creator as the Creator is of her.  But looking at my life, I see that I fall short in so many ways.

It is easy to be mindful of God on Sunday or even during the 15 minutes that I may or may not carve out of my day in order to not look stupid this Thursday at Bible study.  It isn’t hard to be mindful of God when life’s crises bring you to your knees and you know you have no answer but Him.  But it is oh so difficult to be mindful of God when my child has disobeyed me for the 300th time and it isn’t even 9:30 a.m.  Or when my three-year-old still won’t use the potty.  Or when the baby is screaming, the boys are fighting, and dinner still needs to be made.  And then hubby calls and says he will be late . . . almost never does mindfulness of God enter into my reaction at that moment!  And what a difference it would make if I were living in those moments with more awareness of God’s presence, His glory, and my dependence on Him.