“Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you.” Proverbs 4:25 NIV
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV
Have you noticed how easy it is for our kids to get distracted? At my house, television, video games and even the computer easily distract my two kids. Pam and I seem to be always repeating ourselves and getting them re-focused on the chore at hand, like getting ready for school, brushing their teeth or eating dinner at the table.
Sadly, adults are not much better at staying focused. We seem to always be drifting away from our primary mission and God has to snap his fingers and regain our attention. We seem to get caught up in the temporal and forget the eternal. We forget our primary assignments in order to chase after things that once caught, dissolve like sand in our hands.
For me to stay focused and not get distracted, I try to remember my primary assignment which is to love God, love Pam, be a dad to Abram and Callie and lead New Life. There’s not much time or bandwidth left for anything else. The moment I try to add something to this list, one of the primary assignments has to take a secondary role and that is never good long-term.
Next, I try to anticipate distractions because they are as certain as death and taxes. I know something is a distraction because it deflects my attention away from my primary assignments. Once I realize that an event or situation is consuming my time and energies, I have to determine if it is a distraction or an emergency.
Emergencies are different than distractions. Emergencies are something that can be solved with the right amount of attention and care. Distractions are like mirages. The closer you get to it, the further it moves away. Distractions are something that cannot be solved by any amount of attention or care. Distractions are perpetual time wasters and drains on your emotional batteries.
My charge to you today is to make a list of your primary assignments. Next, make a list of things that are distracting you from these assignments. Are they emergencies that can be solved or distractions that will only drain your batteries? Let’s fix our eyes straight ahead, refuse to be distracted and remember that eternity is something that deserves our primary focus and energy.
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