Focus, Focus, Green

Focus, Focus, Green

“What are you doing?!?! You forgot?” I vividly remember my football coach yelling at us in his picture enhancing words, “You don't forget what's important... Do you forget to wipe after using the restroom? Walk around stinky?,” he paused to point, “No, you do what's important. Make your football job important.”* Life is the same way. You can't do or remember everything. You have to prioritize, choose which cards to hold and which to discard. The quicker you do it the better because your competing against time - he hasn't lost yet.

In my accelerated college course the first thing I took was a course on memory. It was an audio course taught by a man whose name I have misplaced, but I do know he had a funny voice that was feinted – like speaking with your nose plugged – and achieved a few awards for his ability. One of his lessons showed that the mind remembers the objects you focus on. The lesson went something like this:

Look around the room. Find everything that is the color green. Keep looking, find all of them, every single one of them. Look at your clothing, look at the ceiling, look everywhere. Now close your eyes. Your mind should be black and void. Now slowly visualize all of those items. Do you see them now? Keeping visualizing them one by one. Are they all in your head? Do you see them all? Keep your eyes closed and tell me how many red objects are in the room. Sound unfair? Can't remember any red objects? It isn't unfair – you only remembered what you focused on.

The course continued on explaining and teaching me how the mind more willingly remembers pictures over text. Need to remember a license plate? Assign a picture for each character. Say the license plate is 4QRW421H. That might be long for remembering a sequence of random numbers and letters, but there is a way to make it easier, less random. Picture (Four) (Q)ueens (R)unning (W)ildly (for) (twenty-one) (h)ours. Maybe they are getting tired and slowing down, or drank too much coffee and still going strong – why would they be running for twenty-one hours? Make it into a story. Conversely, to make another example, you could say Four Quilts are Ripping William into four-hundred and twenty-one pieces of human-burgers - the more dastardly the easier to remember. But the entire idea of the course was to find the things worth remembering, focusing on those things, and sticking them into your memory – a license plate is important to remember if you are at the DMV.

As Christians we are fortunate to have the Bible with commandments and histories that converges on God's will. So why aren't Christians perfect? We have God's will spelled out for us – literally in most cases. Sweeping aside sin and its intrusion, by far and wide the single reason is focusing on the wrong things - I did not say bad things.

Most confusing is that there is a difference between wrong things and bad things. There are many good things in our lives and many bad ideas, but focusing on good things in the wrong place should be equally avoided. Working hard is almost proverbial, it is the quote of every failed husband. Working diligently is proverbial. Working without sacrificing your family. Loving your family without sacrificing God. Everything is balanced on a slim edge of time and eternity.

Time sits unnervingly. He hasn't moved and never sleeps, tapping away on the table he is counting your remaining life. Breaking down under the glare of time, I get lost in the frantics of deadlines, wants, places to go, remembering, forgetting, while everything around me seems to be falling apart. Sometimes I fix that by working extra hard to complete my “To-Do” list. I feel better at night to have a list of accomplishments thanking me. But Time is still the victor. I focus on “To-Do” lists for the wrong reasons. I become economical and extricate all the “fluff.” Instead of posing for my little sister so she can draw a picture of me, I am in my room, door closed, trying to finish up a job. Instead of coaching my little brother's football team, I am trying to catch up on my reading. I focus on the wrong things because I have the wrong reasons.

To defeat time you must focus on the one who can break it: God, who was before and will be after. God provided Ten commandments, but, in comical fashion, Christ understood we couldn't remember that – He stated two: Love our neighbors as our self and love our God with all of our hearts, with all of our soul, and with all of our mind. Our family is our closest neighbor, not the job to make us feel better. Working hard was never something God commanded us to do, He commanded us to work hard for Him. When we focus on God, we focus on the right things in the right place. Time can only claim victory when we focus on things constrained by time. But when focused on God and family we grab Time by the neck and place it in the right place – not tapping away our life, but collecting moments that will last forever.

I started off college learning how to learn. When we live our life we must begin by learning how to live. We need to focus on what is important and remember. Don't be looking for green when you know we are asking for red. If you don't know what color to look for, look for which color to look for. Spend time focusing on what is right. So next time, when you use the restroom take your Bible with you.... As I said, the more dastardly the easier to remember.

*No, that is not a word-for-word quote of my high school football coach. You wouldn't know it, but he was an English teacher. On the football field he religiously held a few choice words that I omitted or replaced.