SHIFT THE FOCUS
Honesty hour: work has been taking over my life the past few weeks. It’s our award show season, which means long hours requiring perfect work, all on display for the entire world of hair to see—all the high stakes. I took on so much of the mental pressure of it, and I found that I let the roughness of that one thing take such a toll on me that I haven’t been able to focus on much else. In turn, it affected the outlook on the rest of my life…when you’re IN it, it’s so easy to get caught up.
Letting one thing become the focus of our whole lives it gets dangerous. Not dangerous in a good way, like praying dangerous prayers, but dangerous in the sense that when we focus so hard on one thing, we:
A. Don’t give God the space to move how He needs to move because we try to control it.
B. We become closed off to everything else God is doing.
C. We begin to let lies about God and his goodness seep in.
The past few weeks I really let my perspective on my whole life get muddled with the one thing that was stressing me out. But Jesus was so so sweet this past weekend and I got a breather. I had a full Saturday of friends and no pressing responsibilities. We went to the beach in Indiana. We had fun and we laid on the beach listening to music and swimming in Lake Michigan, but we also had serious God-talks around the dining room table over Thai food later at night.
I was gently reminded that one aspect of my life isn’t in top shape right now, but there are other things that are so good and that are flourishing.
God has placed things in all of our lives. There are flourishing factors everywhere around us, but it’s up to us to take our tunnel vision and our zoomed-in perspective and turn it into a wide angle lens. We need to see everything in our world, not just keep our eyes fixed on the one thing bothering us.
Tunnel vision clouds your overall judgement, it makes you miss everything else going on around you. It puts you in a place where you can’t appreciate what’s happening because you can’t even see it. I couldn’t even see that I had a beautiful life full of God-given relationships until I took a step back on Saturday to take my focus off of work and to look at another aspect of my life (even though those relationships have been there all along).
God doesn’t want us to be so fixed on one thing (that he’s totally in the process of taking care of, by the way) that we miss what he already has for us.
Shift the focus. Widen the scope of what you’re looking it. I guarantee it isn’t ALL bad. And even if things are pretty bad—there’s at least one thing that isn’t. If you give God the same amount of attention you give to the things that are causing you pain, stress and anxiety, He will do something with it. Something will shift in you and in your life.
The wide angle view catches so many more colors and details.
God didn’t call us to be miserable. He’s not asking us to zoom in on all the little details and try to correct each one. He called us to live our best lives. He wants us to see the full picture, see the imperfections AND the good things, and give it back to Him to edit. HE’S GOT IT. And He’s got it with your best interests in mind.
Sometimes that’s going to the beach and turning your phone on airplane mode to allow yourself to bask in the gift he has for you that day—the rest can wait.
