February 5, 2010

Auto-Focus

Now that we’re a little over a month into twenty-ten, are you still on track with the resolutions you made? What are you focusing on this year? Your health? Your spirit? Your finances? Your relationships? Are you determined to learn a new skill?

Whatever you want to change, it will take focus.

I love to take pictures. Since I have young kids, I mostly take photos of my family. We bought a really nice digital SLR camera a couple years ago that takes a great shots. It has a lot of great manual settings for all different kinds of photos, but with kids I usually don’t have time to figure that out. I need to grab it, point it, and shoot it in a matter of seconds or that moment will be lost. For that reason, I keep the camera on the auto-focus setting 95% of the time. The camera knows what part of the frame needs to be focused on and what part can be left blurry.

Wouldn’t it be handy if we had an auto-focus setting for our brains so that we would never lose focus? Our attention would always be aimed at God’s priorities for our life. If God were to create a Human 2.0, perhaps He could install that feature. But God doesn’t release software updates, because unlike software developers, He got it right the first time. He created all the functionality we need in version 1.0, way back in the Garden of Eden. “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). So why did He want us to have a brain that loses focus?

Because God wants us to need Him.

God is the provider of everything we need, and He desires for us to depend on Him for meeting those needs, and among those needs is our daily focus. It’s in our relationship with Him—as we walk and talk with him in the cool of the day—that He will set and reset our focus.