Focus

I have a bad habit. I guess I have more than one bad habit but I have one that keeps turning up in my motorcycling. My instructor did his best to stress that I had to keep looking at my destination and not at the little orange cones that he would put down to indicate the path. If you look through the turn or through the slalom then the bike goes just where you want it to. If you focus on the cones then you run over the cones instead of around them. I knew it worked because I’d had it work for me while I was riding a complicated slalom or set of curves in class. It wasn’t a question of belief. I was sure that the instructor was correct. It was a question of being so easily distracted from my focus on the destination. Once my instructor was standing on the course as I was riding by him on the little 250cc bike. He was next to a cone and once again I rode by staring at the cone rather than the destination. For my benefit, he said nice and loud, “Isn’t that cone a beautiful shade of orange?” He made his point. You have to see it but you can’t focus on it. My focus was off. He would look at me and slap his hand up under his chin to tell me to get my eyes up to the horizon. Peripheral vision is for peripheral things and not for my destination.

God has been challenging me to keep my focus during this time of making decisions about the care of my mother in her last days. It is hard to keep our eyes up where God would have us focus. A couple of weeks ago we discussed the following Scripture:

Hebrews 12:1-2 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (ESV)

Nothing escaped Jesus’ notice. He saw every lost lamb. Jesus never lost any of those that the Father gave him (John 17). He ran His course perfectly and calls us to run perfectly too. Often when God uses the term “perfection” in Scripture it is equivalent to completeness, maturity, and being full grown (e.g., James 1:4; James 3:2; 1 John 4:12). I pray God’s Grace would grow us up to the point that we are “looking to Jesus” with the focus needed to make us complete, mature, and full grown in Him. And all this is for the Glory of God alone (Soli Deo Gloria).