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As I quickly approach my sixth decade of life, I am starting to believe the old adage that says, "Getting old isn't for sissies!" There's a lot of truth to that statement.
One of the most troubling things that I have found with aging is how our hearing and eye sight diminish. Of these two, the one I struggle with the most is failing eye sight. I swear that I woke up on my 40th birthday and couldn't read anything anymore without glasses. Over these past 20 years since that fateful day, my eye sight has slowly gotten worse. Now, seeing things from a distance, especially in my right eye, is starting to become an issue. I just can't get my eyes to focus as sharply as they use to when I was younger.
The Bible talks a lot about our focus and our vision. Focus and vision play an important role in what I think it takes to make us live this life as the victors God sees us to be. It is when our focus turns fuzzy over certain things, and when our vision ins't as sharp as it needs to be in particular areas of our life, that victim thinking can creep into our everyday activities.
Take a look at what our Bible reading says today.
People with their minds set on you,
you keep completely whole,
Steady on their feet,
because they keep at it and don’t quit.
Depend on God and keep at it
because in the Lord God you have a sure thing. Isaiah 26:3-4 (MSG)
In other translations, that first line talks about those who have their focus on God. Focus plays such an interesting role in how we view life and the circumstances that come our way.
I have found that we can only focus on one thing at a time. When we focus our attention on one thing, everything else goes fuzzy around us. My father use to take us outside to look at the stars when my brother and I were kids. He would tell us not to focus on the brightest star in the sky or we wouldn't be able to see those stars that are less bright. It was when we let our eyes adjust focus in the darker areas of the sky that a bunch of stars became visible that seemed to not be there before. It wasn't that those stars were hidden. It was that our eyes were focused on something more obvious, making the less obvious that much harder to see.
That's the way it is in life as well. It is when we focus on things that are more pressing that we tend to miss other circumstances all around that focal event. When bad times hit, it is so easy to focus on the demands of that situation and miss the miracles that are happening all around us. Victim thinking happens as we become so preoccupied with one event that other, sometimes more meaningful events, appear to be absent. Focus makes it so easy to believe the lie that goodness from God isn't for us because of a bad situation in our lives.
Believe me, I know how bad, bad times can be. I'm not saying shifting our focus will make the badness go away. What I am starting to see in my life is that focus shifts bring a perspective that might make what I am facing more tolerable. Please don't ever think I believe that God sees bad times as something good in our life. They aren't. Just as true as that last statement is the fact that bad times are NOT evidence of God not loving us as fully as we need at that moment.
Victim thinking makes it terrible easy to focus on one thing at a time. It is when I have come to the point of believing that victimhood is a part of who I am that my vision blurs in ways that make me miss so much of the goodness that happens, even in the midst of the bad times I face.
Our vision can be a problem that makes it very easy to see life in a way God never intended. When our natural eyes take a turn for the worse, some type of correction is in order. That correction is usually introducing a different lens through which we look to make our vision as sharp as it is suppose to be. With our eyes, that lens comes in the form of glasses. When it comes to identity, the lens we need to correct our blurry vision is what God says about us.
It is when we view life through how God sees us that the things we focus our attention on seems to change. This doesn't mean that our problems go away. It just means that, with perspective, we can focus on things that might actually make it that much easier to find our way out of challenging times. It is when we are stuck focusing on those things driven by victim thinking tendencies that we get stuck in problem areas for way too long. Hope often comes when we change what it is that we choose to focus upon.
There are many places in the Bible where it talks of raising our eyes. It is when we shift our gaze from the problems we might be facing here on earth to the heights where God is calling us to commune with Him, that our problems start to look blurred and fuzzy. It is when we find that we start to believe we are who God says, that our problems seem to have less of an impact on our ability to live as the victors God has called us to be.
Maybe it is time to do a little vision check today. On what are you allowing your focus to be drawn to? If the answer to that question shows that your gaze is pointed a little too low, shift that gaze. Focus on who you are in God's eyes. Focus on your identity as God sees it. Focus on God and let the rest of the world grow strangely dim.
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