Men are notorious for being distracted. Most of us could qualify for having ADD — Attention Deficit Disorder. In fact, I heard about a guy who was so distracted over one thing and another that he had to have his wife tell him almost everything. One day his wife came into the room and said, “Here’s the sweater you asked me to find.” He said, “Are we going somewhere, or am I cold?” That would be funny if it wasn’t so close to home. I can’t tell you how many times I have walked into a room and asked myself what I am doing there. I knew that I came there for a reason, but it was beyond me what it was because I became distracted by something else.
It is hard to remain focused isn’t it? Life for many consists of rabbit trails rather than highways. They are always on the move, but not really getting anywhere. The distractions of life dictate their decisions and control their schedules. We make a lot of plans, but get very little done. The phone rings. We need something at the store. We want to check our email. We get caught in the web of the internet following a story, looking up something, blogging, reading other people’s blogs, checking the weather, looking to see if the Buckeyes are any closer to a championship, or just catching up on the news. The kids need to be dropped off, and then they need picked up. Something needs cleaned or repaired. A stack of books are begging to be read. Even making lists of things that need to be done is a distraction. The problem is that it all seems important, or at least necessary. Our lives are filled with the urgent, and we have no time for the eternal. We have tended to a million little things and left undone the big things. We have filled the day with things that do not ultimately matter and left undone the things that do matter. We have done what seemed necessary and neglected what was essential. Days turn into months and months into years, and our lives have become trivialized by distractions.
How do we escape this ruthless cycle of distractions which keep us from what life was meant to be? Let me suggest a few things. First: You need to move from pragmatism to passion. Pragmatism is doing something because it gets results or it works — at least in the short run. It is more practical to get your needed rest than it is to get up a little earlier and make time for God. It is more practical to make the expected compromises at work than to take a stand for what is right. It is easier to go along with what everyone else is doing and thinking than to be different and have a biblical mindset. It seems more practical to meet all the demands of a hectic schedule than to eliminate some things.
Pragmatism is doing what works to get you through life with the least resistance. Passion is the craving of a heart that wants to experience the fullness of life no matter what the cost. Pragmatism has little goals that ends in a little life. Passion is being committed to a cause that is bigger than yourself and end in a large life. Passion is fire in the belly. It means that your life is defined and directed by exalted goals and purposes that have engaged your heart and are directing what you do with your life. It means something is driving you that has captured your will and set it on fire. You are not being pushed around and driven by the world; you will settle for nothing less than God’s best for your life.
It is very difficult to overcome distractions if there is no fire in your belly and you have not been captured by what Thomas Chalmers has called, “the expulsive power of a new affection.” This magnificent new obsession expels all unworthy affections and attaches itself to what is high and holy. I think this is why the Holy Spirit is symbolized by fire. The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives creates passion — a passion for God, for righteousness, for rightness, for life. It makes all other passions seem unworthy and undesirable. When that happens we find that we are not just passing through life, we are grabbing it for all its worth.
One of the things I enjoy about my grandchildren so much is their natural enthusiasm for life. Somehow we lose that as we grow older. The cares of this world, the routine of life and the concerns we carry put out the fire. That’s why we need to come to the fire every day to get rekindled. We invite the Holy Spirit into our lives every day to renew and ignite the fire in us again, because we don’t want to go dragging ourselves through life, we want to be victorious over it with a new enthusiasm for the things of God and for life itself.
This is what Paul experienced. He was full of enthusiasm because he knew that the love of God was the thing which enabled him to live joyfully. He said, “What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? . . .Christ Jesus, who died — more than that, who was raised to life — is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:31-39). He was not going to be distracted by anything, because he was consumed by a holy passion. If the love of Christ is not something you can be passionate about, what is?
The second point is that you not only need to move from pragmatism to passion: You need to move from being fractured to being focused. We are all tempted to be controlled by the tyranny of the urgent. Our lives begin to be controlled by a thousand little things rather than one grand controlling theme. If you can begin each day in the Word you can see the big picture for the day. If you begin each day with prayer and meditation then you can focus on what is important. But if you just start the day running you will never stop running. Let the Holy Spirit guide you in creating life goals and ask him for the power to focus on those and carry them out each day. Reassess all the things that you are doing and ask if they fit into the big picture of what God has called you to be and do. You may have to make new priorities and order your life by them. Drop unimportant things, even if they disappoint some people, so that you can do the important things. Focus on keeping the main thing the main thing. The problem is that the main thing gets crowded out by a lot of things that are not even related to the main thing. When our lives are this fractured, is it any wonder we are broken? Focus on what your life is meant to be.
There is a difference between living and existing. You only exist when the routine of life pushes you around and determines how you will spend your day. You only exist when you go through each day and never ask what life means or what your purpose is. You begin to live when you are so focused that you will not settle for merely existing.
Tim Allen, star of the television sitcom Home Improvement, said in a Reader’s Digest article: “How much of the day are you awake? You think, ‘I gotta get the dry cleaning, I gotta get going, and this and this.’ All of a sudden it’s dinnertime. And then there is a moment of connection with your spouse or your friends. Then you read and go to bed. Wake up, and it’s the same all over. You’re not awake, you’re not living, you’re not experiencing. We start early medicating ourselves. We start kids early on TV and video games and so on. It’s daunting how many possibilities there are in life for every one of us. But rather than face that I may be a failure or a success. . . people find diversions.” We need to be focused instead of fractured.
The third point is: You need to move from wandering to living life on purpose. Most people today are merely wandering from one day to the next with no eternal goals or purpose. They have never stopped to ask what their purpose is or examine why they are here. The end result is that they live only to please themselves. There is no grand theme or purpose to guide their lives, and no plan on how to get there. You may want your life to be different, but if you have no plan on how to get there nothing will happen. How different it is for the Christian. The Psalmist wrote: “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Psalm 16:11). He came to God and asked him to show him his purpose in life. He asked him to reveal the path of true life. And when that happened, he not only experienced purpose, he experienced the resulting joy and pleasure of life as well as the God who created it.
There is a purpose for your life and it is important to discover that purpose and not let a thousand little distractions rob you of it. I think of the disciples sleeping in the garden when Jesus needed them to be with him. He had warned them of the importance of prayer. He told them it was the only way they would be delivered in the time of trial and temptation. But they missed their purpose in those moments. They chose sleep over vigilance. It is no wonder that within a few hours Peter betrayed his Lord and the rest of them ran when they could and should have stood.
In her book, A Practical Guide to Prayer, Dorothy Haskins tells about a noted concert violinist who was asked about the secret of her mastery of the instrument. She said, “There are many things that used to demand my time. When I went to my room after breakfast, I made my bed, straightened the room, dusted, and did whatever seemed necessary. When I finished my work, I turned to my violin practice. That system prevented me from accomplishing what I should on the violin. So I reversed things. I deliberately planned to neglect everything else until my practice period was complete. And that program of planned neglect is the secret to my success.”
I like the idea of planned neglect. She had a purpose, and she put that purpose first and deliberately neglected other things. She was a violinist and she never forgot it. She was a violinist first, and everything else came after that. What would happen in your life if you would not check your email or surf the net until you spent time in the Word? What would happen if you did not turn on the radio or Katie Couric in the morning until you had time to seek your purpose for the day as you spent time in the presence of God? What would happen if you used the principle of planned neglect and put first things first? What if you got up a little earlier to make all this possible? What if you would not let anything distract you from your main purpose? You might not be as fractured, or even if you were pressed by things that absolutely demanded your attention at times, you would always have in the back of your mind what your real goal was and get back to it. There might be momentary distractions, but they would not knock you completely off course.
The story goes that there was a worldwide convention where Satan and his demons schemed of how to effectively tempt the followers of Christ. In the devil’s opening address to his followers, he said, “We can’t keep Christians from going to church but we can steal their time. Let’s keep them busy in the non-essentials of life and invent innumerable schemes to occupy their minds… keep them busy, busy, busy! And when they meet for spiritual fellowship, involve them in gossip and small talk so that they leave with troubled consciences and unsettled emotions. Let’s crowd their lives with so many good things that they have no time to seek the best things.”
Jan Fallon writes something similar as she tries to emulate C. S. Lewis in his Screwtape Letters. She has the chief demon say to his nephew, “My dear Wormwood, At last you have shown some ability at success. Your last report indicated you have perhaps understood, finally, what I have meant by distraction. Now, your patient is falling into bed not with eternal questions, but with anxiety about what her cohorts think of her. These are not the questions of ‘What is my purpose’ and ‘Does God really exist’ which invade her silence. In fact, her desire to define herself by the thoughts of others is not a question at all. It is a sentence. She has doomed herself to vacillation. Now, instead of becoming more solid, more truly human in its sacredness, she becomes more fluid and undefined, as water dilutes a luscious myrrh, violating its original aroma. This is a very worthy distraction, an unending supply of quandary. Since the human will live forever one way or the other, her quest for other’s approval could last a lifetime! You have moved on from the destruction of belongings, which have fleeting moments of concern, to the construction of personal image built upon the presupposed critique of others.”
Frederick William Faber (1814-1863) wrote about distractions when he said: “There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on.”
Today is a good day to turn from pragmatism to passion, from being fractured to being focused, and from wandering to living life on purpose.
Let me ask you a few questions this morning. What is your main purpose in life? What is your second most important purpose in life? What is your third most important purpose in life? Now let me ask you, “Does the way you are living your life truly reflect those goals?”
Rodney J. Buchanan
March 5, 2006
Mulberry St. UMC
Mount Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
