Out of Focus: Keeping Your Eye on the Prize
Ever since I can remember, there have been commercials promoting the newest thing you have to have. Toys, cars, food, you name it, and commercials will try to conceive you you need it! Thanks to several YouTube videos my husband Casey watched, we are now the proud owners of a drone. After bringing our newest toy home, Casey got to work trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, the set up process wasn't as easy as the videos made it look. With his frustration growing, Casey set it aside and asked Montana and I if we could make it fly.
After a lot of button-pushing and two days later, I finally got the drone to work. I wanted to test it out, but with the rain happening outside, there was only one option. Indoor flight test. (BTW, this is a very terrible idea, as this story while illustrate). I sat the drone up on the table and started it up. At first, everything was going well. All my focus was on the drone and making sure I wasn't going to run into anything. It was great, until our dogs came downstairs and our chocolate lab, Paul saw a new toy. He then began to freak out and attempt to reach the drone to destroy it. Paul started leaping on the furniture, trashing the living room and knocking everything over. With all of the chaos, I couldn't land the drone anywhere and tried to keep it flying up at a safe distance. After realizing who was flying the toy, Paul began to jump on me to reach the remote. With the distraction of my hyper pet, I didn't pay attention to what was happening. With my focus off of the drone, it ran into the wall and broke one of the propellers.
With the downstairs trashed and the drone broken, I had the difficult task of having to tell Casey that I got his drone to fly and then broke it. He wasn't exactly happy about it.
I learned two lessons from that experience: 1. If the instructions say don't fly the drone in the house, don't fly it in the house and 2. When we take our focus off of what's important, we end up making a mess of everything.
In life, a lot of things will try and pull your attention. Our focus and attention can get distracted from the main things like our relationships with our families and friends, Jesus, trying to raise responsible human beings, trying to be a kind and responsible human being, etc. Bad days, hurt feelings, distractions, disappointments, and heartaches can take our attention off of the "drones" of our lives, causing us to look away. When our focus gets pulled away, we put the important parts of our lives in danger of taking a beating and possibly breaking under the pressure. It can be hard to stay focused when life starts jumping at you, demanding your attention. Hard times will come and the unexpected will happen, but we have to keep our eyes on where it matters most. When our focus doesn't stray from the main things, the distractions will still be there, but they won't hinder us from what's important. With our vision solid on our main mission, the distractions can't take you down.
To put it simply: Let's keep the main thing the main thing.
That's all from me. I apologize for the lack of posting. In the spirit of this lesson, I've been trying to focus my attention on the main things in my life: Jesus, my marriage, my daughter, my church, and my mental health. I can't say for sure when I'll be posting next but I look forward to writing to you all again.
God bless and have a great weekend!