Living for God is mindfulness of God!

Listening to God is living for God

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – THURSDAY SECOND WEEK

March 05 - Jeremiah 17:5-10; Luke 16: 19-31

Listening to God is living for God – at times this “living for God” can become a cliché, meaning almost nothing, something that could remain merely a poetic way of saying nothing. But if we truly consider the sense of that call – to live for God – it would begin with living with God; living mindful of God who is with us!

Being mindful of God becomes a relevant call, especially in today’s context, where self-love and self-promotion are sanctimoniously safe guarded as an unquestionable right of individuals. Hence, what happens to the other or who happens to be around are immaterial and negligible as considerations. There can be three effects to such a lack of mindfulness of God – exaggerated and faulty grounds for life, justified insensitivity to the other, and incorrigible regrets that define life.   

There is nothing wrong in relying on the goodies that make our life easy, but an exaggerated reliance on them would make us sadly ignorant of the source of these so-called strengths of one’s being. Can we make them the ground of our meaning and security? The world does that and soon faces a disillusionment that cannot be blamed on anyone else other than oneself. That is the situation of being cursed, that the first reading refers to.

When we fail to be mindful of God who is the source of all that is good, we become so immersed in our haughtiness that we are blinded to anything other than ourselves. Alterity becomes a botheration, a nuisance, a needless burden, an unnecessary and insignificant thought that matters the least. Look at the way we define progress and peace today – is it not annihilating the other who is a nuisance and having our domineering way?

When this tendency is not recognised and addressed in time, we can grow so callously used to it that we would soon have regrets that can never be set right. The rich man in the parable did have his regrets about his way of life, but when it was too late and they could never be attended to. The world is racing its way towards this predicament; we would fall for its fallacies, if we do not get mindful of God on a daily basis – that is indeed the beginning of living for God.