Monday, December 9, 2024
Scripture Lesson: This is my prayer, that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value, so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. (Philippians 1:9-10)
Each day we are offered the opportunity to have some say as to what enters our minds. In choosing to read and meditate on scripture we are indicating our intention to fill our minds with what is pure and wholesome. Each day we are also bombarded with a myriad of less than wholesome sounds, words, and images. Add it all up: the priority of technology, institutions, and profit over persons; the easy acceptance of gun violence; the growth of sexploitation; the betrayal of public trust by elected officials; an angst, even an anger, toward the immigrant; the global demise of basic human rights; the blind eye being cast over the bombing of so many innocents just to reclaim land; a blatant disregard for the aging; and the continual demeaning and denigration of women over their reproductive choices, just to name a few. Each image or word demanding our attention in all sorts of sizes and colors and with all sorts of gestures and noises. Whether we ask for it or not is not the question. We simply cannot go far these days without being engulfed by social and political division and scaremongering.
But do we really want our minds to become the depository of such insane and awful rubbish? Do we really want our minds to be filled with the things that confuse us, irritate us, aggravate us, excite us, depress us, arouse us, repulse us, or attract us whether we think it is good for us or not? Do we really want to let others decide what enters our minds and to determine our thoughts and feelings?
Clearly, I hope we do not, but it will require some real discipline on our parts to let God and not the world be the Lord of our mind; to allow the record of God’s love made visible to remove the cold darkness infecting us and transform us into the people whose trust in the power of God’s love light the way toward “the day of Christ.”
O Lord, help us this Advent to reduce our daily input of distractions and to focus instead on seeing and appreciating the realities of faith; to store up the things that really matter, so that we may do justice to “see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (I John 3:1).
Mike Valentine,
District 5 Regional Elder