To Lose Faith’s Focus Is Both Dangerous and Tempting

 

When I was a little lad, old enough to ride a bicycle but not nearly old enough to drive a car, somewhere in the pre-teen larva stage, my family and I (those of us who were still at home) spent some evenings doing what families now almost never do: we rode bicycles together around the block, around the neighborhood, for fun and a little time together.

I know it’s hard to believe, and it gets harder. We even on regular occasions took time to sing together as a family.

I don’t want to misrepresent things. My dad worked most evenings, but somehow we still managed to have a good bit of family time together. In our world today, it seems that 1) many families don’t really want much time together, and 2) every conceivable activity under the sun (not bad things, just lots and lots and lots of things) conspires to make sure families almost never have any real time together.

I’m fairly sure it was clear to my parents early on that I was almost certainly not heading to the NFL or the NBA no matter what degree of attention we paid to such things. In those archaic days, kids’ sports actually had seasons and year-round wasn’t much of an option. Family time was a bit easier to come by.

Anyway, our family went through a stage where the family thing we often did was to ride bikes together.

I remember one evening’s ride—at least, most of it—fairly vividly. We’d gone south down our street, Goliad Street (named for the famous Texas battle), and we were riding along one block east on what passes for hills in the flat high plains, riding down Palo Duro Street.

I think we’d passed the house of the weird family I remember, one of whose sons had an iguana lizard for a pet who, on one memorable occasion, jumped out of a tree onto the back of a very surprised postal person.

We weren’t quite to Granville and Daisy Kizer’s house when I suddenly became distracted. Maybe I was interested in the view, or just talking, or looking upward for an iguana in the trees—but I piloted my two-wheeled craft straight into the rear end of a parked car.

Just for a moment there, I’d quit looking forward, put the bike on auto-pilot, and plastered myself and the bicycle all over the back end of that car. I wasn’t going really fast, but I was going too fast to make running into the back of a car the kind of pleasant experience I’d care to repeat.

I hit hard—first vertically, and then horizontally, rearranging most of my spinal column. (And, no, I definitely do not want to repeat anything like that as an adult on my motorcycle.)

In what has become one of my favorite psalms, Psalm 73 (which you can read for yourself), the psalmist begins by talking about a great way, in a spiritual sense, to end up stopped dead in your tracks, flat on your face, bruised and bleeding, biting asphalt, derailed, de-biked, and demolished.

It’s a focus thing. You see, it is as dangerous as it is tempting for Christians to take their eyes off the Lord who should be their focus, and to start looking instead at all the multitude of distractions and problems around them.

It’s tempting. But I can tell you from oft-repeated experience, you can get hurt that way.

 

 

      You’re invited to visit my website at http://www.CurtisShelburne.com!

 

 

Copyright 2017 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.


Leave a comment

To Help Support My Music

No pressure, but if you'd like to help support this music-making, thank you!

Enter the amount you wish to donate

$

The minimum tip is $0.00

In cart Not available Out of stock