In the ​’80s, the United Negro College Fund ran a TV ad — you might remember it — with the iconic voice of James Earle Jones declaring, ​“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Even as a kid, the ad made a deep impression on me. It drove home the message that everyone deserves the opportunity to cultivate their mind and put it to good use. Knowledge and creativity expand with the right nutrients and thrive with mental exercise. But when people lack access or opt out of education, the mind withers. 

Cultivating intelligence is not our topic today. If it were, I’d feel compelled to share my heartbreak and bewilderment at the enthusiastic trade-off of more and more human brilliance for the anemic regurgitations of algorithms.

But today I want to spotlight a different human capacity that too often goes to waste: Attention. 

Attention is your birthright every bit as much as intellect or creativity. 

Attending is not an IQ thing. It’s a posture of alertness, of sensitivity. It’s the conscious choice to concentrate on something, to deliberately hold it in your gaze and focus. It is presence. It is enjoyment and consideration. It is … love. ​“The first act of love is always the giving of attention.” 

You don’t have to be smart to love; you do have to be attentive. 

Attention is the currency of love, and if you waste enough of it you’ll wind up broke. Richard Foster was bold enough to write in the opening of Celebration of Discipline, ​“Distraction is the primary spiritual problem in contemporary culture.” 

Brain science proves what I know from experience: Too much noise or visual clutter fragments my focus. Too little sleep impairs my concentration. An overcrowded schedule muddles my mind. Too little time outside dulls my sensitivity to God’s subtle vocabulary. Manipulative apps hold my attention hostage. 

I also know from experience what strengthens attention.

Reading a book. Memorizing a poem. Giving your full focus to a child telling a long story. Observing a lunar eclipse, or spying on a great blue heron stalking a fish. Standing in the check-out line without a phone in your hand. 

We don’t think of these as ​“spiritual” exercises, but every little classroom for attention helps us, indirectly, to become people with a greater capacity to love God and love others well. 

You might argue that some people naturally have a longer attention span than others. Even so, the question each of us must answer is: How will I steward the span I have?

If you have a five-minute attention span, do you invest your focus in something worthy of the precious five minutes? 

The honest truth is that I’ve wasted my attention too many times to count. Like that servant in the parable who got a little bit of money and failed to invest it in anything worthwhile (Matt. 25:14 – 30), I’ve disregarded small spaces in my day that could have become portals for awareness and wonder. 

But I’ve also had the joy of seeing a drop of well-invested attention expand to bless someone with dignity, crack open a hidden mystery, or open the door for joy. I don’t want to overstretch the parable, but this fits what the ​“good and faithful servants” did with their portion, and it’s an observable phenomenon that as you use your attention, it grows! 

Attention is a terrible thing to waste.