Get Your Focus Sighted In

Our youth pastor, David, prays before we start worship and usually shares a short message of how God is working in his life. One Sunday, when his daughter, Jael, was very young, he told us that he watched when his wife entered the church and how the other women of the church would flock around her trying to catch a glimpse of baby Jael. They were all vying for her attention and Jael was looking from one to the other, as if choosing which lady she would fixate on that day. But then David walked by, and her attention immediately shifted, as if to say, “Sorry ladies, my Daddy just went by and he gets my attention first.”

In our lives we are surrounded by things…activities, jobs, friends, family...and they are all vying for our attention first. We get focused on things and lose sight of what’s really important. Our heavenly Father is passing by and He’s hoping to capture our attention above all else. Matthew 18:3 says “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

My family likes to hunt and we own a lot of rifles with scopes. The first thing you do when you buy a scope is you go to a gun range and you “sight it in,” meaning you shoot with it to see if your aim is too high or too low, too far right or left, etc. You keep tweaking the focus until you are able to hit the mark on your target. Sometimes, in our lives, we lose our focus, losing sight of the Father, and we miss the mark, by a LONG shot. Maybe we need to be more like then-baby Jael, who had her focus perfectly sighted in so that even when she was surrounded by all those distractions, she never lost sight of her Daddy.