30 Before 30: Focus and Concentrate

And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.  Philippians 4:8

I was watching a cartoon with my niece Sunday morning, definitely cannot remember the name of the show haha.  Of course God finds the most unorthodox ways to speak to me! LOL.  But sure enough, there in the cartoon was a great lesson.  Two of the characters were so busy focused on separate things, one focused on how the other person would approach a problem, the other on getting strawberries, that they were not successful.  The one focused on how badly he wanted strawberries was not present in the moment of playing with his friend and missed out on having fun. The other was focused on how the rabbit would have tackled the problem of getting the strawberries to the point that he got scratched in the thicket and took some bumps; he wanted to surprise the rabbit with strawberries because of how much he liked them.  And of course it rang out loud and clear to me, whatever has your focus affects your concentration. Eventually, they both readjusted their focus and ultimately achieved their goals!

I have spent so much time focused on the wrong things in the past.  God eventually showed me how much of a distraction they were to my doing His will.  So rather than have a "woe is me" mentality about it, I recognized that I could correct that issue going forward by adjusting my focus.  As I began to pray for a divine focus, God turned things around for me.  Of course I still have moments when the mind monkeys take over, but God is faithful because I became much more focused in looking to Him first.  This lesson touches so many things: 1) being so focused and consumed with getting a thing/person/place that we lose sight of God (inadvertently making that thing an idol), 2) being so focused on the problem that we make ourselves unavailable to seek out and receive the solution, and 3) trying to do things distracted and making detrimental mistakes.  If we would merely live by Matthew 6:33 and seek God and His kingdom first, we could rest in 1 John 5:14-15 -- knowing that since we are in His will, He will give us those things we seek because His will has become our will.  If we lived by Matthew 6:33 and focused on God, we could enter His rest and have peace that as we are led by Him we will get everywhere we need to go when we need to be there.  But this isn't a passive process, we have to renew our minds daily to focus and concentrate on God.

So today, if you have to do it over and over, confess the scripture above and believe that as you look to God and focus on things above, you will breakthrough!