“A person who aims at nothing is sure to hit it.”
-unknown
A few years back I was speaking with my next-door neighbor about his preparation for his first attempt at a half-ironman triathlon, a competition that requires the contestant to swim 1.2 miles, bike 56 miles, and run 13.1 miles. He said he had been doing all his swim training by doing laps in a pool. When he went out to train in the open waters for the first time, he wound up swimming over a mile in the wrong direction. “Why?” I asked.
He said, “It’s pretty simple. When I’m swimming in the pool I am looking down at the large black line that marks my lane, and there’s no current, it is impossible to swim off course. In the open water, nothing is marking my lane and I have to be aware of water currents.” Once the tri-athlete has prepared himself mentally for the event and has developed the discipline to complete the task at hand, the only missing ingredient is focus.
In the book of Hebrews, we find the writer making this appeal to his readers; “We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away (Hebrews 2:1).” The early Hebrew Christians were losing their focus. They were considering reverting back to Judaism or Judaizing the Gospel – making it something that it wasn’t because they were adrift from lack of focus on the things they had heard and seen.
The problem with drifting is that it is subtle. It’s a slippery slope to a place that we don’t want to go, but one we wind up at anyway, all the time asking, “How did I get here?” One of the biggest challenges we all face these days is the pace at which the current is moving, in everything from technology to morality. It’s easy to drift with the current of the culture, especially since it requires far more effort to do otherwise. But where we finish has everything to do with where our focus lies. What a shame it is to develop the mental stamina and the discipline needed for the task at hand, only to swim in circles.
Feel like you’re swimming in circles? Take the advice of Hebrews. “Pay more careful attention” to the things that matter. The circles you find yourself swimming in are either from a focus on the wrong things or a lack of focus on the right things.
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