Reorienting Attention

So I think we have to ask ourselves, you know, are we relying on our own strength or are we trusting in God's provision? Do we really believe that obedience is more important than immediate results? Are we willing to obey even when obedience doesn't make sense because we have such a focus and attention on God that doing anything else just doesn't make sense?

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Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Prepped. In today's episode, we're going to dive into what it means to reorient our attention., and it's a key principle, I think, in living the unbalanced life. Attention isn't just another task on our to-do list. I think Ian McGilchrist has a really great perspective on this. He wrote a two-volume set of books called The Matter with Things, and he addresses a lot of different aspects of attention through research on those who have had, you know, some sort of damage to one side of their brain or another, left brain, right brain. They've done, you know, various psychological experiments that sort of try to understand how the left brain does things differently than right brain. And so this is what he talks about when he talks about attention. He says this: attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. It is a profoundly moral act. And so from his research, what he sees is that attention is a way of recognizing the world around us. It's a way of— we could almost say it's a way of narrowing, or can be a way of narrowing what we actually see in the world. So we can think of it in terms of blind spots. The world as we see it, we are always looking at the world without a recognition of what our blind spots actually are, or not understanding what we can't see. And so attention becomes this really crucial thing because if we're ignoring important aspects of our life, if our, if our vision becomes so narrowed that we can no longer see what's going on around us, or we're ignoring the things that are relevant around us, that then becomes for him this profoundly moral act. In other words, attention changes the way we interact with the world. And I think we see this actually in some other research. There was a journal article written in the New England Journal of Medicine. I'm blanking on the author right now, but he discusses this idea that, um, we think about addiction, oftentimes we think of it just in terms of a disease, and he argues that it's actually a learned behavior, and that this learned behavior, what it does is it ends up narrowing our perspectives such that the only thing that those who are addicted can really understand is how to go after the thing that they are addicted to. And he refers to this as sort of reciprocal narrowing. And so all of a sudden, however it is that you begin to get addicted, that addiction begins to take over your life by becoming the center point of your attention so that your whole life is oriented toward and given attention to how do I get that thing that I'm addicted to next. And we see this with drugs and alcohol, but we also see it with things like social media. And so anything can become a learned behavior that sort of narrows our field of vision. And you can understand that as we pay more and more attention to that one thing that we're chasing, how these various other elements that don't help us get to that one thing that we're chasing, they start to become less and less part of our world, we might say. We, uh, we, we pass them. And I like to use this analogy, you know, when I'm driving on the highway, we have these mile markers along the road, and those mile markers are there for more specific purposes. But let's say that I start really getting enamored with these mile markers alongside of the road, and what I'm doing when I'm driving, instead of watching the cars in front of me, I'm just counting those mile markers off. I'm really attending to the side of the road where those signs are, and I'm making sure that I pass each mile marker and each mile marker is in sequence. And maybe I'm trying to figure out how they relate to the exit numbers. You know, how does all this work? You know, I'm paying so much attention to are they evenly spaced? Does my car's, you know, odometer, does it, does it read along with these mile markers? Are they off somehow? And all my attention goes to that. I'm going to be far more likely to run into someone because as I'm driving, I'm no longer paying attention to the other drivers. I'm just giving all my attention to the mile markers. That's the similar idea that McGilchrist is arguing for here. It's a profoundly moral act because what we pay attention to reflects what we care about. It reflects our values. Now, I would say for Christians, we need to sharpen what McGilchrist is actually saying., and I think we do that by saying that attention is not simply a moral act. I think it's a profoundly theological act. How we pay attention to God is going to determine how we align ourselves with reality itself. So attending to God becomes this really crucial thing that Christians should be doing. And when we decide that we're no longer going to be paying attention to God, what we're really saying is that God is not infinitely more relevant than any other actor or factor in a given situation. It's similar to saying, I'm not going to pay attention to the cars when I drive. They're not important. I really need to be paying attention to the mile markers off to the side. And so that, that attention that we pay to God, this is why it's a profoundly theological act. Our attention, when we're orienting it toward God, when we're focusing on God, when we're trying to see God in everything and recognizing he's present and active and that he is the most relevant element in any given situation, he is the most relevant person we could ever pay attention to, and so we don't want to take our eyes off of him. That is part of what it means to give our unqualified loyalty to God. But it doesn't come naturally to us. I think we're going to have to learn how to do that. And so in this episode, we're going to discuss the theological nature of attention. We'll dive into that a little bit more deeply. We're going to talk about why paying attention to God is essential. We want to talk about some practical steps to reorient our attention, and then we want to talk about how our reoriented attention transformed us, transforms us in our relationship with God. So the first thing to start with is the theology of attention. And I think McGilchrist's words really do challenge us to think about how attention shapes the world we experience. So he talks about attention as the way our world comes into being for us. And again, you know, sort of like I was talking about before with the car analogy, that it's a really important concept. Obviously, there's a reality outside of us. He's not denying that. He, he, he is not at all like a postmodern thinker where he's saying there is no reality except what we pay attention to. That's not it. Uh, but what he's saying is that for us, as we're interacting in the world, we don't see the full scope of reality necessarily. What we see is what we pay attention to. And if we pay too close attention to something, other things then get lost, right? Uh, and so we can use any number of analogies. We could use, you know, horses and blinders, um, you know, so that they are not distracted from running straight on the track. Um, we could talk about this in terms of— I, I think flow states is a really interesting concept that's come out of cognitive psychology. You know, this idea that we become so focused and joyful and interested in our work that it just rolls through us. And so we're only focusing on that, we're not focusing on anything else, and we can kind of become enraptured within that work at that moment. I have this in, uh, you know, I, I had an example of this when I was working out with my wife the other day. You know, I was in the middle of a set and she asked me a question. Well, I can't really— in that moment I was, I was lifting a fairly heavy set and I was trying to concentrate on it, and so I couldn't give my full attention to her because I'm trying to give my full attention to the weight that I'm lifting. And so I had to wait till I was done and then ask her to repeat that question and actually take a little minute to think about it. And so in that moment, yes, I knew that she was there. I knew that she'd asked me a question, but it wasn't as if I could turn my attention away from what I was doing to actually listen to what she was saying. I registered that she was talking, but there's a real difference between registering it and attending to it. And I don't know that I can explain that perfectly, but it is, I think, a posture that we adopt when we pay attention. We posture ourselves differently. We are, you know, leaning in in some ways to what we're doing. So if you think about trying to pay attention without doing certain things, you know, it's not just a cognitive activity. It's generally a shift in our very being. This is how we're paying attention. And so doing two things at once, while we often talk about multitasking, and there are some instances where I think that's possible, there is a very real difference again between registering that something's happening and paying attention to it. And so I think as we pay attention to God, that allows us to get a good handle on theology. It's a theological act because it aligns our perception with God's presence, truth, and purpose. So in other words, when we're looking out at reality and We see God standing before us. We realize that what we're doing in our lives is living our lives out in God's presence. That should change and shape the way that we think about what it is that we're doing. It should change the direction and course of our lives, the shape of how we go about doing the various things that we do. I think about this in terms of, you know, you see these instructions to bondservants in the New Testament, and bondservants are to serve their masters as they would the Lord. Paul gives this advice in numerous epistles. And the general idea is this, that, you know, probably being a bondservant wasn't anybody's dream when they were a kid. They're not like, you know what, I'd really like to grow up to be bondservant. But what Paul is trying to get them to understand is that being a bondservant is not necessarily a bad thing, and that the way they are to serve as a bondservant is as unto the Lord. Now, masters are supposed to do the same thing. Masters are supposed to serve as one under authority, recognizing that the bond servant is actually God's servant. And so there's, there's instruction given to the masters that they are to be kind to these bond servants because they're not actually theirs. The point is that this is giving an attention to God. It's recognizing God's authority in this situation. It's understanding that as you pay attention to that authority, as you do more than just register that it's there, as you actually attend to it, it's supposed to change the way we interact with one another. And so when our attention is misdirected, when we, when we focus on something lesser than God, we're often going to distort our understanding of God, ourselves, and the world around us. Because without God in the picture, we are now subject to all of our limitations. We're subject to our finiteness. If I'm trying to tackle a problem and I bracket God out of the equation, so I'm just attending to the problem and I can't really see that God is there anymore, God feels absent. I'm left with whatever resources I have to make this work. And yet I think when we attend to God first and then we look at the situation that we're in and we say, okay, this situation is very different because God is with me. You know, there's a reason the psalmist can walk through the shadow of death, right? Or walk through the valley of the shadow of death without fear. And it's because God is with him. His rod and, you know, the shepherd's rod and staff comfort the psalmist in that setting. If you just think about what's happening there, it's not that the valley of the shadow of death goes away. It's still there. But the psalmist, in giving attention to the rod and the staff of the shepherd, the good shepherd who is leading him through this valley, that valley takes on a much different tone and context. It changes the way he sees it. We could also see this in something like Deuteronomy 8:3. Moses there reminds the Israelites that their time in the wilderness was really intended to teach them something about how to live life more generally. God's humbling them. He's feeding them manna. He's preserving their clothing, but he's trying to teach them that man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. That's what he's trying to teach them. And if they can attend to God in that situation, if they can understand that their obedience to God, their trust in God, is what's going to get them through this situation, That's the lesson he wants them to learn. There needs to be a sense in which they're orienting themselves toward God, paying attention to him, and recognizing that even though they may be tired of eating manna, it's better than nothing. Even though they may be, you know, tired of wandering through the wilderness, that God is with them. He's trying to teach them this, help them to understand that obedience to his word is always the best strategy. So paying attention to God is really meant to cultivate a trust in him, even when provision seems scarce. And so I would say the same thing for us as we think about attention as a theological act. I would argue that the fear of the Lord, which is a concept that's fairly prevalent in the Old Testament, I would argue that the fear of the Lord includes this idea of attention, because what attention really is doing is it's always saying, God is infinitely more relevant than any other actor or factor we may face. So we see in the Bible that we, you know, we are to pay attention to God. It matters. The Bible repeatedly calls us to set our minds on things above. See that in Colossians 3:2. We're supposed to be still and know that God is God in Psalm 46:10. But I think our world tends to pull us in every other direction, and that makes it difficult for us to focus on God. The world tends to overwhelm us, and there's a reason I think that Scripture continually calls us back to attending to God, to recognizing that God is present, to recognizing that God is active, and recognizing that following God is our best strategy. And so when we fail to pay attention to God, we tend to have distorted priorities. Like Israel in the wilderness, we may focus more on what we are lacking than on God himself. And so instead, to go back to Psalm 23, you know, if we say, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want," I'm not going to be lacking anything because God is with me. That's a very different orientation than complaining because we've been eating manna for a week and a half, you know, or multiple years. That's a very different orientation. I think we see something of this in, you know, the Book of Daniel, the example of, let's say, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, where they're going into the fiery furnace and they're, you know, Nebuchadnezzar is stoking this fire and he's making it huge. And they say it doesn't matter whether God delivers us from this this, you know, punishment that you're giving us. We know that he is able. We're not sure that he will, but either way, we're not going to worship your statue. You know, that is an attention that is given to God that is a great example of recognizing that God and our loyalty to him is more relevant, infinitely more relevant than any other actor or factor we're facing. These guys are about to be thrown into a really hot furnace, so hot that the people who throw them in are burned up. But there they seem calm, cool, and collected because what they're saying is it doesn't— that furnace, yeah, I'm a little concerned about it, but it can't capture my attention. My attention has to be captured by the Lord and by the Lord's instruction and by my loyalty to it. So without this sort of right attention given to God, our priorities will always be a bit distorted. And I think when we talk about our priorities being distorted, we're really talking in part about our perspective being distorted. If our attention is consumed by busyness or fear, we tend to forget God's sovereignty and God's provision. And so what we have is a shift in perspective where we're no longer dependent on the Lord. We are independent from him. God is so distant that we have to take care of things ourselves. That is not going to lead to good places. Again, we see numerous instances in scripture where this is problematic, where people are doing things out of selfish ambition. We see that in Philippians where Paul is talking about these folks who have been preaching the gospel out of selfish ambition, seeking to do him harm. Now, ultimately, God's going to redeem that practice anyway, because as long as the gospel is preached, it's a good thing. But we also see some of these instances in the Old Testament. I think of, you know, Jephthah's Gerrit's vow in Judges 10 and 11, where he decides that he's not going to trust fully in God's provision, trust God to actually rescue the nation, and he makes this vow that ends up requiring him to sacrifice his daughter. We lose perspective, right, because we pay attention to the wrong things. Perhaps the best example of this is King Saul. King Saul is constantly worried about how many people he has on his side. He's constantly worried about what the people are thinking, how the people are feeling. And in part, this ends up being the reason that he is rejected as Israel's king. It's because he fears man more than he fears God. He attends to what's going on with the people as opposed to just obeying God and doing what God says to do. And this becomes a real problem for Saul. So we lose perspective, we start to pay attention to the wrong things, and as we pay attention to those wrong things, our understanding of God, the world, ourselves is skewed. And then I think we have diminished worship. You know, worship does require focused attention. I think there are ways in my own life that I tend to miss what God is doing for me because I'm just not attending to him. I'm not paying attention to what he's doing in my life. And so sometimes I just expect things to happen, and when they happen, I'm not particularly grateful about them. And part of that is because I'm just not noticing, not attending to this idea that God is the one who's actually giving me those things. So without attention, our worship becomes really superficial and I think perfunctory when it should be, uh, deep and ubiquitous in our lives. So attention modifies everything— how we think, act, and live. It's not just what we look at, but how we interpret and engage with the world. So what are some practical steps to reorient our attention? I think the first one is we have to question some of our assumptions. You know, we've got to challenge the basic assumptions that are driving our attention away from God. You know, if we believe that our resources and our efforts are ultimately crucial to living our life the way we want to, that's a wrong assumption. In Deuteronomy 30:20, I love this verse. God is giving the Israelites his instruction. They're about to enter the Promised Land. He's giving them some final instructions and he says, you know, I'm giving you the opportunity to choose between life and death. Choose between good and evil. And the good is obedience. Life comes through that obedience. Obey God's instructions. Do what God is saying. Be faithful to the covenant. Evil obviously involves, you know, going on your own, ignoring God's instruction, you know, being disloyal to him. And in the midst of that, there's a line that says, for the Lord is your life and the length of your days. The Lord is your life and the length of your days. And the idea here is that this obedience, the instruction that God has given you, is so crucial because God is the one who's going to make your life work. Without God, without attending to him, without obeying him, without having this orientation of attention to God so that you're making sure that you're, you're always constantly pleasing God, you're following after him, your life will never work. So I think we have to ask ourselves, you know, are we relying on our own strength or are we trusting in God's provision? Do we really believe that obedience is more important than immediate result? Are we willing to obey even when obedience doesn't make sense because we have such a focus and attention on God that doing anything else just doesn't make sense? So recognizing those false assumptions, I think, helps us redirect our focus to God's will. I think the second thing, and I've mentioned this in previous podcasts, I think we have to establish a cadence of life. I said in a previous podcast episode that I was going to be kind of repetitive when I gave these practical tips. And it's because when I think about this, I think a big part of our problem, we don't need a more creative solution to be faithful to God. We just need to get back to the basics. I think busyness and constant stimulation fragment our attention. If you think about trying to read your Bible at a rock concert, you're standing right in front of the speakers up front. You're listening to some guy wail on a microphone. You're listening to the, you know, the guitars and all that kind of good stuff. You'll probably get through whatever passage you're trying to read, but it takes an immense amount of effort to concentrate on what it is that you're reading at a rock concert. There's so much going on around you that that chaos makes it make it very difficult for you to focus on reading something. You know, I would say, you know, think about taking in, you know, really complex academic work. There are certain books that I can read with music on, you know, and so sometimes when I study, I'll have music playing in the background and I'm still able to focus on what I'm reading. But then there are other books that have, you know, half a page worth of footnotes and, you know, they're really technical. Or if I'm trying to read the Bible in Hebrew or Greek or something like that, I generally try to do that in as much silence as possible because I need to be able to attend to what I'm looking at that much more closely. And so the more stimulation we have around us, I think the harder it is for us to attend to things. And so that picture of reading your Bible at a rock concert is a good one, I think, because it just— it gives you a different vibe. If you were sitting in a quiet room reading your Bible, you're pretty sure you could get through it. If you're sitting at a rock concert right in front of the speakers, just listening and having everything go on around you, getting bumped around, you know, you're trying to— maybe, maybe you're in the mosh pit and, you your Bible's being jostled, it's very difficult to attend to it. And I think that's a good analogy for what happens in life oftentimes. We're in the middle of chaos. We don't know what's coming. We don't know how things are going to work. And because we're not creating a cadence of life where we can attend to God, we are far less capable of attending to God within the chaos of life. So we need to create that, that godly cadence, that rhythm of rest and reflection, that, that time where we open up space to really pay attention to God. And so, we could consider practices like just setting aside that time during the day. I like the idea of also, you know, having some sort of mechanism to remind me about this throughout the day. So, when I was a personal trainer, what I used to do, I had a note card that I put in my pocket and I would have a Bible verse on it. And I could pull it out and just read it anytime during the day. I didn't have to carry a Bible around with me. That wasn't practical in that setting, but a note card in my pocket was perfectly fine. Mind. And so it wasn't about just, hey, let me have my devotional time in the morning. I could also do this throughout the day, and that was really helpful. I think finding time to observe a Sabbath— now when I say Sabbath, I don't mean taking a full day off or anything like that necessarily, but I think that as we carve out these times during our day, you know, for instance, if we're carving out time to do daily Bible verse and prayer, we're functionally creating this holy time during our We're saying this time is going to be uniquely dedicated to God. And as I set this and carve this time out, this is going to be my holy time with the Lord. And then I just think we need to build moments of quiet into our day, even if they're brief, because without that sort of a cadence in our life where if we're under constant stimulation, we never take a break, it's very difficult for us to remain focused on the Lord. The third thing I'd say is we need to identify those false musts. Again, this is something I mentioned in a previous podcast, but, you know, we're bombarded with things that the world calls and tells us that we have to do. You know, whether it's binge-worthy TV shows— used to be must-see TV when I was growing up on NBC, must-see TV. It wasn't actually must-see. It was okay if you didn't watch those episodes. It was, it was totally fine. You didn't you didn't keel over and die. But, you know, the world tells us that there are these things that we must do. This is a have-to. So we, we sort of surrender ourselves to constant notifications or endless news cycles, and those distractions can feel urgent, but they're often really meaningless. And what they end up doing is they end up fracturing our attention, fragmenting it. And, and so, you know, just as for instance, when I record these videos, I I turn the Do Not Disturb part of my phone on, and so I'm not getting any notifications at this point. I'm not getting email notifications, I'm not getting text notifications, I'm not getting phone calls. I have no idea, somebody could try— be trying to get a hold of me right now. But if, if it's just a series of random texts from, you know, things that I've signed up for online, or spam phone calls, or whatever have you, that's a real problem. I, I'd love to be able to, you know, get the right messages in, but to do that, oftentimes what we have to do is sort of narrow and close, uh, what those notifications are, because we don't have to have all the information that we're given. We don't have to be the masters of everything that comes out on the news. We don't have to do that. And so after a long week, we might think that we have to just unwind with mindless scrolling. But we don't actually have to do that. That may not be the best way for us to do that. It might not be something we need to do. But maybe we could choose instead to meditate on scripture or read a theological book or just rest. And I think resisting those false musts, they free our attention to focus on what truly matters, and that's glorifying God. So I would say, ask yourself, you know, what false musts sort of dominate my life? What, what do I feel like I can't give up because the world is telling me I have to do this? And then ask yourself the question, do Do I really have to do this? And then how can I replace those things that I find with practices that would draw me closer to God? And I think finally, the last thing, and this relates to obedience, but delighting in God's law. You know, we read in Psalm 2 that the blessed person delights in the law of the Lord. He takes pleasure in obedience. And it's just interesting to me that we don't tend to do this. We were given this roadmap to blessing. And the blessed person is the one who takes pleasure in obeying the Lord. And so doesn't it just make intuitive sense that we would figure out how to do this? That we would take the approach of obedience is going to open up and deepen our joy. It's going to widen our perspective, not close it down. It's going to help us understand who God is more deeply. It's going to give us an experience of God that we've never had before, and in that we are going to find pleasure. So we've got to take the small steps that we need to take in order to obey God. They don't have to be big, you know, steps of obedience. I think just the small things, learning to do this, beginning to obey God's commands in even small ways will help us with this. We need to reflect then on how obedience brings peace and purpose to our lives and use those experiences to fuel further obedience, to help develop the sort of trust that we need in order to follow God. With our whole heart. So when we think about how this sort of reorientation of our attention can transform us, I think what we see is we're going to gain clarity. God's presence is going to reshape how we see challenges and opportunities in relationships. If you just think about James 1:2, you know, count it all joy, my brothers, when you experience troubles of various kinds, for, you know, you're growing. God is going to strengthen you in your faith as you go through them. Well, that's not a denial that there is ever going to be trouble. That is, when you think about what God is going to do through the trouble you face, you should count it all joy. It's a reorientation, a reinterpretation of that trouble. And so God's presence is going to reshape how we see these things. It— and when we pay attention to God, what we end up getting is a new interpretation of the world, a new perspective on life, and it changes the way we encounter everything that we encounter in life. It changes the way we approach it. So I think we're also going to experience peace. Having God with us and attending to God with us is a way of allowing us to trust him even in uncertainty. We're going to deepen our worship because attention is going to help us see that worship is not just what we do on a Sunday morning. It's not just singing in church. It's every moment of every day. It's going to make that practice ubiquitous in our lives. And then I think we're going to glorify God because as we pay attention to him, as we give him our undivided attention, we're going to acknowledge his worthiness and we're going to begin to make choices that orient us, posture us to point to and glorify him with everything that we do. So reoriented attention, it's a profoundly theological act. It changes the way we interact with the world. And so instead of, you know, chasing after fleeting pleasures or worldly success, we live with the mindset Paul describes in Philippians 3. Philippians 1:21, "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain." So just to close this out, I think reorienting attention isn't going to be easy in a world full of distraction, but it's definitely essential. And like I said, it's a profoundly theological act. Attention is a profoundly theological act. It's about aligning what we see and our actions with the reality of God. And to do that, we have to attend to God's reality in our lives. So just ask yourself this week, what's capturing my attention? Is it God? How can I shift my focus toward him instead of these other things that are distracting me from him? And remember, the worst-case scenario isn't missing out on worldly pleasure or success. It's about failing to glorify God. That is our worst-case scenario. Scenario. And when we prioritize his presence and paying attention to his presence, we open ourselves to his infinite possibilities and abundant grace. We're going to be able to do things beyond anything we could ever ask or think. Thanks for joining me on Prepped. If this episode has encouraged you, please share it with a friend or leave a review. Share it, you know, subscribe with us on YouTube or on wherever you listen to your podcasts. We're going to be exploring responding to God in the next episode. Episode. And until then, let's just commit to giving God our full attention and living unbalanced for his glory. Take care, and we'll see you on the next episode of Prepped.

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