Posts Tagged: the age of distraction

“ONE THING”

On August 29, 2018 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

This is not an age that is tailor-made for concentration.  In fact, I am tempted to call it “The Age of Distraction.”  Right now, for example, the air conditioning guys are here working, and I am trying to keep the dog from doing what dogs do: barking.  I am also trying to get my class syllabus much closer to its final form, preparing for Hebrew class tonight, and worrying about elections in Florida and Arizona, even though I do not live in either state.  Plus all this, there are some health concerns (pain in my upper body, and weight dropping too fast), and my tendency to want to just check out of reality entirely and play computer word games.

I wouldn’t exactly call distraction a sin, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a virtue.  In any case, distraction is, well . . ., it’s a distraction!

Into all this distraction, much of which I create myself, comes a very concentrating Bible verse:

“One thing I have asked from the LORD, that I shall seek:

That I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life,

To behold the beauty of the LORD

And to meditate in His temple.” (Psalm 27:4, New American Standard Bible, 1995)

I am not good at asking for help, and when I do, I tend to ask for many things.  I am even less good at seeking one thing.

According to the rest of this psalm, David (or whoever wrote it) had plenty of serious problems, enemies, and distractions.  Yet, he focused on one thing—God’s presence.

Interestingly, even though Hebrew has flexible word order, it usually has a verb-subject-object word order.  If the order is different, it often suggests a different emphasis.  In the first line of this verse, it is not the verbs that are first.  The objects are first.  This tends to emphasize those objects.  “ONE THING, I have asked from the LORD, THAT I shall seek.”

I realize that not all of you, dear readers, are Christians.  Some of you may not even believe in God, with or without a capital “d”.  In as sense, if you don’t believe in God, not concentrating on such a non-being makes perfect sense.

But the sad truth is that even those of us who do claim to believe in and love God struggle with any kind of sustained attention to him.  Why is that, I wonder!

Maybe one of the problems is that we don’t see just how beautiful God is.  David was determined to concentrate on the LORD, at least in part, because the LORD is beautiful.

If we, if I, really believed that, would focusing on God be quite as difficult, I wonder?  Beauty has a way of captivating us, whether that beauty is the Grand Canyon, a beautiful body, or the beautiful sunrise this morning.  If we saw how beautiful God really is, we would perhaps find it easier to concentrate on God.

However, perhaps the order can be reversed.  Perhaps if we concentrated more on God, we would see just how lovely God really is.

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