I love pictures. I know people like my mom don’t like their picture taken, but to me, photos help me to remember. They give me joy to look back on the past at smiling faces, whether posed or caught off guard. In our first house, we had a wall of photos of family and friends. Everyone who visited posed for our cork board wall and we enjoyed seeing their faces each day.
In our current house I’m more into the framed photo look. I had a wall of family pics, but it is in a current state of unfinished when we took it down to paint. Eventually, we may put them back up, but since we want to move…it’s these things that get delayed. Should I pack them or enjoy them until that time?
Of course, photos are best when they are in focus. Just like talking to a friend over Messenger or some other Internet service is always better when we are both in focus rather than blurry.
But focus has another meaning, and that’s what I wanted to talk about here. The thing is, it’s really easy to lose our inner focus and get distracted by things that are not our main goal. Or to just get distracted by things that don’t matter or aren’t true and then we end up confused and struggling to find peace again.
Last year was a year of distraction for me – and I daresay for most of us. For us, life changed when COVID hit and so many plans got canceled. But add COVID to other things in life like sudden isolation, which felt like prison to many, or job loss and health care loss and relationship struggles and maybe most of us became self-focused.
I know how easy I fall into that trap. But then I picked up a book on prayer – one of many I’ve read over the years. It’s not that I didn’t pray or know how to pray. I’ve prayed since I was a little girl. I have journals that could fill at least one bookshelf filled with prayers. I pray the Psalms. I pray God’s promises and ask Him to fulfill them.
But we can always learn more about the way we relate to God, and I am no different than anyone else. The one thing this book taught me that actually surprised me by how much it changed my focus was the way we pray. Our attitudes, our honesty, our confidence in God, the level of our faith–so many things that can draw us closer to God or keep Him at a distance.
Prayer is really coming into the presence of God and not just giving Him a Santa Claus wish list, but listening to Him speak back to us through His Word. It is also coming to Him in faith that He CAN do what we are asking of Him. If we ask for the things we know He wants too–like for people to believe in Him, for relationships to reconcile, for us to fellowship with Him like some of the great people of Scripture did–then we know we have the things we are asking of Him.
We know. We can have confidence that He will grant the requests that align with His desires too. What we don’t know is how or when He will grant those requests. But we are told to keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. We are to pray and not give up.
So when I pray for someone to be given the grace and faith to believe in Jesus, I know I am asking God to do what He already wants to do. I can have confidence that He is able and willing to do so.
The trouble is–prayer can seem tedious and even depressing when we have been asking for something for a very long time and still see no answer. It’s easy to grow discouraged when we take our focus off of what God can do and place it on our circumstances that aren’t what we want them to be.
The enemy of our souls loves to distract us–take our focus off God. It scares him to come upon a praying Christian. Prayerlessness is much more preferable to him. So he does his best to distract our focus onto something else. Perhaps our health is a problem. Maybe my focus ends up on my pain level or the broken relationships I see or the messy drama playing out in the lives of people I know and love. Sometimes it’s my own messy drama. How better to distract us from looking to Jesus than with problems in our personal lives?
It works too well on me and the enemy knows it. But now I know it too. And so my focus doesn’t need to stay on the struggles in the world or the health crisis we face or the many other things life throws our way. When I’m tempted to be discouraged by one thing or another, I am learning to cry out to God to help me focus on Jesus. To walk with Him and talk with Him and listen to Him tell me I belong to Him. To be attached to Him as a branch is attached to a vine. His life is mine. My focus is Him.
And it’s there I find joy and peace. That doesn’t mean I won’t fail or get distracted and out of focus again. I will because I’m human. But now I can remember that my God is able. He CAN do anything. Nothing is too hard for Him. It’s simply my job to abide (stay close to) Him. Everything else comes into clearer focus when my eyes are fixed on the One who makes sense of all the rest.
Selah~
#focus #prayer #livegrace #lovetruth #fixyoureyesonjesus #pictures
