Pay Careful Attention to Your Attention
A captivating torrent inundates the senses of the teens and preteens I work with every morning. Their gaze fixates on the twelve-square-inch screen in their hands. The scene flashes and the next clip seizes their focus, demanding their attention for a few more seconds as a stream of fights, dances, jokes, pranks, rants, and filtered faces kindles something in them. Watching them, it is the disinterest of their posture toward the material they consume which strikes me.
The body language of these developing young men and women presents a marked contrast to their rapt attention. These minds hold no quarter for anything but their own amusement, but this isn’t amusement; it’s anesthetic.
Bored. They are bored.
And in their boredom, they barely blink their way into a glassy-eyed, joyless trance of watch-swipe-watch-swipe-watch-swipe. Rather than engage in relationship, conversation, play, work, community, or anything really, they endlessly scroll through an endlessly repetitive series of endlessly desperate posts made by endless individuals seeking to fill the endlessly deep hole at the center of every soul.
It is frightening.
I want this to be a generational problem. I want to blame parents for giving their wards access to smartphones. I would love to slap the technology right out of the hands of these impressionable minds. I wish I could convince the developers to make their apps less addictive. An audience with public health officials in order to decry the whole industry would suit me just fine, because I have a hankering to let loose a tirade of rebuke fueled by indignation.
But who am I to do so?
I am the same dang person. I impulsively snatch up my phone every time it buzzes, dings, chirps, lights up, and otherwise makes itself noticeable. But the issue lies not just in smartphones, apps, or social media but also in the uncountable phenomena flitting through our day-to-day lives, vying for our attention. We follow and check in on sports teams, family members, pets, boyfriends, girlfriends, and celebrities. We distract ourselves with sex, food, politics, leisure, exercise, and the like. We entertain ourselves with a myriad of activities which can outpace our intentions. While some pursuits do deserve our focus, other less deserving undertakings steal our energy and our time rather than benefitting us. They draw us away from valuable endeavors, relationships, and exploits.
I fear we immerse ourselves in these diversions, pastimes, and avocations haphazardly, paying little heed to what they cost us—how much they ask and take of us. We end up inadvertently ensnared by our own interests which have the potential to delight and distract us from the One for whom our hearts were designed to worship.
The human heart inclines itself to worship, to elevate “x” often at the expense of the rest of the alphabet. It happens instinctually. We don’t even have to try to worship something, but we still end up doing so. It is that easy. The ramifications of where we direct our worship, what or whom we choose to elevate, stretch well beyond our bank accounts or our relationships. What we worship affects our souls.
I’m reminded of the last verse of Psalm 19, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer” (v. 14). David, the psalmist, wants to be found blameless before God. In verse 13 he prays that God will keep him from sin and that sin would have no power or sway over him. This desire to be innocent manifests itself in the words of his mouth and the meditation of his heart. He wants to speak in a manner worthy of God. David wants the music of his heart, the “new song” he writes about over and over in the Psalms, to be acceptable to God. But before he even gets to this meditation, this desire, he begins with worship.
The first six verses of the Psalm declare the glory of God revealed in creation, then David shifts his focus, describing the Lord’s teaching as perfect, sure, right, pure, clean, true, and worth more than any earthly creation or possession (19:7–10). Here David directs the hearer of his song to the tongue-stilling majesty God set before mankind in creation. His words point to a beauty and power which leaves him awestruck. Then, David steers the listener from general revelation, which reveals the omnipotent creativity of God, to God’s special revelation of himself through his word.
For David, it is not enough to know that God designs and creates and upholds; he wants to know how to live in light of that knowledge. As such, he not only looks to how God has ordered creation, but how he has spoken to man. Through the word of God, David hopes to be corrected, purified, and made to stand. He sets his compass to the true north of God’s acceptance rather than man’s and he subsequently seeks to speak and think and feel in a way the Sovereign of the universe finds acceptable, recognizing both God’s grandeur and his own insignificance by comparison. In this Psalm, David confesses his hunger and thirst to be right in the eyes of his Lord, and he states that heart cry by meditating on God’s glory and commands.
David knew that the focus of his attention was also the source of his hope. He witnessed the fallout when his predecessor King Saul succumbed to the temptation to elevate himself instead of the will of God. Through his own sinful behavior, David was intimately familiar with the consequences of his gaze shifting from what mattered most to what entertained him. He knew distractions abounded, and he had to be careful about where his eyes and thoughts lingered.
We, too, must be cognizant of what and where and when and how and why we watch, listen, and otherwise consume content. Why? Because our worship goes where our eyes and thoughts linger. What we consume becomes all-consuming. We must, therefore, weigh the value of that which arrests our attention, filtering out the things which are not beautiful, excellent, worthy, and true. For when we allow ourselves to engage deeply with something—whether it’s something of substance or otherwise— we open ourselves to the danger of seeking satisfaction in something which cannot ultimately satisfy.
Once we scratch the itch, it requires further attention. The moment my eyes or ears or senses find gratification, I crave more of it. And it’s always more than just surface-level amusement. When a compliment sprinkles my parched insecurity with praise, its fleeting and evaporative nature causes me to yearn for it more deeply. The deeper the desire, the greater the need for more potent amelioration becomes.
This is why we must pay careful attention to our attention. We must guard our steps against pursuits which lead us to seek our own glory rather than God’s. We must secure our hearts against the vanity which comes when we seek to be seen by man rather than God.
Christian, I pray that you turn today from the foolish and empty and fleeting and instead pursue the excellent and praiseworthy and eternal. Fixate on the truths of God’s Word which correct and guide you to lives which reflect the glory of God. Work toward a knowledge that shapes your behavior to reflect the truth that acceptance from God is found through the blood Jesus shed on the cross, not by your own ability to keep God’s standard. Then seek to live a life that demonstrates God’s worthiness rather than your own.
Bob Allen and his wife, Mandy, married in 2003 and have two daughters, Lucy and Daisy. They recently moved to Rolla, Missouri to serve as the lead pastor of Salem Avenue Baptist Church after spending the previous six years in Davenport, Iowa where Bob served as the Associate Pastor at New Life Baptist Church. He served the Baptist Convention of Iowa from 2020–2022 as a member of its Pastor and Church Support team and has held various positions for Missouri Valley Baptist Association. He holds an MTS with an emphasis in Preaching and Pastoral Ministry from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a BS in English from Missouri Baptist University. In his spare time, Bob enjoys reading, writing, pickleball, and hiking with his family. He also has an affinity for good coffee and the St. Louis sports scene.