Fix Your Attention

Presidential politics have once again taken center stage in our nation. I must say, the race to the White House has become somewhat like preparations for Christmas...it seems that both now come earlier and earlier with each cycle. It's not that I don't enjoy Christmas nor that I believe that the free process of electing leadership for our nation is insignificant. Preparations for both events are important...and yet, the preparations seem these days to be as important, or perhaps even more important than the actual events themselves.

Perhaps it has to do with our short attention span, moving retailers and politicians to continually remind us of what they believe is important, and therefore should be important to us. Maybe the reason for this early and constant bombardment of interest is our seeming addiction to filling every moment of every hour and day with something to occupy our minds, therefore, the constant advertisements of "seasonal sales" and "pertinent" political information that seem to run non-stop. The cynical among us would say that it's all about money, fostering a climate of materialism that often motivates consumers to spend money on things that they and others really don't need, while politicians spend much of their elected lives raising obscene amounts of money so they can keep their job. (The National Retail Federation projects 469 billion dollars was spent on retail sales for Christmas, 2011, while newsmax.com estimates that 8 billion dollars will be spent by all candidates in the presidential election of 2012.) Maybe we simply lack the self-control to say "no" to these excesses that seem pervasively present in our culture.

The hype and protraction of significant events in our lives that threaten to dilute their importance and heighten the cynicism that unfortunately comes as a by-product, are very present in our current culture. I believe we are losing sight of what is truly valuable in a sea of dollar signs and non-stop rhetoric. From time to time we hear the call to return to simpler values where in another time such abuses didn't exist. Such nostalgic longing is, however, usually not the answer. As I have quoted the great American humorist Will Rogers before, "Things ain't what they used to be, and probably never was." No, we can't turn the clock back and we can't simply apply old patterns to current circumstances.

The words of the Apostle Paul seem appropriate here as he writes in Romans 12:2, as translated through The Message, "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you." Perhaps we have become so "well-adjusted" to our culture that "without even thinking," we accept and become part of a culture that is "always dragging {us} down to it's level of immaturity."

Those who follow Jesus Christ are called to be salt and light in such a culture. It begins one by one, heart by heart, person by person as transformation in Christ begins. And so, let us not be conformed to the immaturity of a culture that chases after that which cannot be sustained, rather, let us "fix {our} attention on God, and be changed from the inside out." Amen.

Jim Abernathy