How Being Mindful of the Present Moment Offers Us Hope

If you lean in close, you can hear it—the desperate cry of people lost in despair, grieving what they thought life should look like. We all carry very real pain and fear, desperately longing for this pain and anxiety to be heard. More often than not, we feel misunderstood and dismissed, further trapping us in a sea of sorrow.

 

This truth settled in as I climbed into my car the other day after meeting a new friend for lunch. I sat and listened to her story, laced with pain and hurt yet sprinkled with hope. As she spoke, I realized there are ways to look fine on the outside, hiding what no one knows you survived on the inside. It’s true we show up at Bible study with a smile on our face and a Bible in our hand, quoting verses about how God makes all things new, all the while tormented on the inside, believing no one understands the pain and hurt.

 

We keep it all buried inside because we’ve believed the lie that our wounds don’t matter. It’s not that we’re ashamed of them. It’s that we’ve come to believe no one cares to listen.

 

It’s not that we want to flash them like a badge of honor. We just know that if someone brushed up against us just the right way, we’d be broken and bruised all over again.

 

There’s healing in telling our stories.

 

Strange how this is. We’re all very different, yet we all want to know: Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you? Does my pain matter?

 

Everyone secretly wants someone to be present in their pain and beauty. We all long for it, yet we rarely give others the gift of our full attention. Even more so, we often don’t pay full attention to ourselves.

 

If we sat and had coffee, I would look into your eyes and say, “Your wounds matter.” I want to touch them, acknowledge them. Acknowledge you. No need to explain them away. I wrote these words in my book The Freedom to Feel, which are the words women tell me they put down the book after reading. Why do we have such a hard time believing what we’ve gone through is worth sharing? It’s as if we believe we’re not worthy of wholeness. Maybe it’s because we’re still living the trauma of our reality, waiting for it all to fall to pieces all over again. Is it because there is no red bow to tie around our story, no happy ending? It’s not easy standing in faith and believing in the promises of Jesus while feeling your reality.

 

I think it’s because we live in a world where we rush through the present moments. We hate the uncomfortable moment when someone is sad, so we spat out Bible verses and cliches to rush through the uncomfortableness to quickly lunge into the future.

 

Gina Biegel, a psychotherapist and founder of Stressed Teens (stressedteens.com), studies young people who’ve sought counseling to help them with their stress. She says our world is oblivious to the impact our screens and the constant noise have on our well-being. “Teens are really never in silence,” she says. “They never have this moment just to be with their thoughts, be with who they are and actually what that feels like, to learn how to be comfortable by yourself.” She uses a technique called “mindfulness” to help stressed-out teens reduce anxiety and depression.

 

Now, “mindfulness” can sound like a new age made up of hocus pocus. Now, hear me out. The American Psychological Association defines mindfulness as “a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience without judgment.” My seven-year-old is naturally mindful—she lives in the present moment. Jesus calls us to such faith when He says, “Unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3 CSB). We can be fully present because our past has been redeemed, and our future is in the hands of God.

Being fully present is our best defense against past and future anxieties. It’s how we heal.

 

Jesus called us to mindfulness when he said, “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today (Matthew 6:34).  There’s a tender moment between Jesus and Peter in John 21 where Jesus is restoring Peter’s identity by asking him three times if he loves him. Jesus finishes by saying, “Follow me.” At that exact moment, Peter sees John and, distracted by his thoughts of the past and future, says, “Lord, what about him?” In a rebuke, Jesus drags Peter back into the present by saying, “What is that to you?”

 

Jesus didn’t want Peter to miss this last intimate moment with him. Jesus is offering protection from the tyranny of the past and future. It’s a weight Peter is not ready for, and none of us are prepared to bear. God lives outside time; the past, present, and future are all present to Him. The present is God’s only reality.

 

Jesus modeled this well. He never missed a moment of beauty, and He certainly never missed an opportunity to be ever present to the hurting—from the woman at the well to the woman with the issue of blood. Jesus paid attention to the beauty and people around Him. I get it, sometimes we don’t want to sit and listen to the details or weep with the wounded. We’d instead make pain invisible. And so the hurting sit in silence, feeling the weight of their own story, never feeling the healing touch of Christ. Because don’t we embody Christ? Is it not our very Savior who also had wounds? So the hurting continues to hurt, and then hurt people hurt people, and the cycle continues because none of us are willing to be ever present to the hurts and wounds of others.

 

When we ignore the suffering of others, we’re ignoring Christ himself.

 

When we choose to stay fully engaged with the person in front of us and listen to the Spirit’s leading, we choose to minister to Christ himself. When we pull up our chairs to be present to the world’s suffering, we love like Christ and offer hope to a hurting world.

 

If we live in the present, we’ll infuse the world with hope. The stories of the wounded ones show us that Jesus’ healing touch is active and alive in the world today. This way of living present is our way of seeing “every common bush afire with God.” Today, we fight against the world’s hurt by living with our shoes off to receive the present moment that awaits us.