Focus is an important part of any task or job.  When there is a lack of focus, details are missed or the job is done poorly.  God has been teaching me a lot about focus over the past few weeks, even to the point of being the topic of discussion at our staff devotionals yesterday.  With the start of a new chapter in my family’s life, I’ve started to notice how scatterbrained and easily distracted I can be sometimes.  I’ve had the focus to get tasks finished, but too often it has meant late nights and pushing myself to the state of total exhaustion.  If I was focused on my tasks at work instead of constantly thinking about things I need to get done at the house and my desire to have a different job at church, I wouldn’t have to push myself down to the wire.  The major consequences of misplaced focus are lack of time and total exhaustion on my part as well as frustration for myself and others.

I’ve become tired of always feeling tired and causing frustration, so I’ve started working on compartmentalizing my focus.  Part of my strategy is using an app on my iPhone that helps me to organize my tasks in different folders so that I can look at just my “work” tasks without being distracted by my “personal” tasks always being on my mind.  My other tasks no longer have to constantly be on the front of my mind because I know I have them written down.

The other part of my distraction is a little more difficult.  Always looking towards the future and what my job could be at church is a major distraction from my current job.  As Pastor Scott Stevens said yesterday, sometimes you have to give up the things you really like or are even very talented at to be able to focus on following God’s calling.  Understanding God’s calling on your life can be a difficult thing to do, but what it really boils down to is doing everything with the focus of bring glory to God through it.  That being said, I hadn’t been following God’s calling.  It’s not because of my position at the church, but because of my attitude towards it.  Instead of doing my job to the absolute best of my ability to bring glory to God, I was doing enough of my job to get by with an attitude that I should be doing something else to glorify God.

Now that I am beginning to understand the basics of calling, I am changing my attitude towards my current job.  With this new focus of glorifying God through my current job and the added structure of my new task organization, I am feeling a lot more free.  I am not as frustrated with my job because my attitude is totally different.  My focus is on the “other side” where I always thought the grass was greener.  Instead, my focus is on what I’m called to do right now.