This week has been a challenge for me. I had to take a few days off work because of a knee sprain. I had planned on catching up with some office-type things during the downtime but found myself to be unproductive. The downtime ended up being misspent, spending too much time on my phone instead of the many other things I could have been doing.
The key to it all, however, is this: I had lost focus. Not on the tasks – that was a symptom of the problem. I have been so busy, trying to complete my degree and work on my business and work full time at my regular job that I had stopped listening for God. Instead, I was trying to carry everything on my own again and I didn’t even realize it.
Psalm 46:10 states, “Be still, and know that I am God.” It’s hard to be still when you feel like you need to rush, rush, rush due to everything on your plate. However, that’s when it is the most important time to get still before the Lord. So many times in the Bible, God calls us to lay aside everything else and just come to Him. Adam in the garden of Eden. Moses on the mountaintop. Elijah when he was escaping from Jezebel. Jesus when his disciples were ministering after the death of John the Baptist.
God will give us wisdom on how to get through our day. He will also assist us in many ways. I can’t count the number of times I was at work, and had the prompting to do something specific and out of my ordinary routine. If I obeyed it, it was a time-saving benefit. When I brushed it aside, I usually had to go back and do what I was prompted to do in the first place.
Part of the effect of losing focus on God was that I also lost part of the passion that was enabling me to keep up with everything. I had forgotten the “why” for what I have been doing. It was truly like the passage in James (James 1:23–25) where the man looks at himself in the mirror, and forgets what he looks like when he walks away. In a sense, I had forgotten that I am a child of the Most High God. I knew it intellectually, and it was still in my heart, but it was buried with the concerns of this world.
The ironic thing is that this month’s focus is on the pillar of Balance. Yet I allowed my life to get so out of balance that I didn’t even know which direction I was going in anymore. So today, I am refocusing on Him. The schoolwork can wait. The business can wait. I just want time in God’s presence.
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