Focus and the Cross

Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.- Proverbs 4:25

When a new year starts and an old year ends I find myself reflecting on my life. I am a firm believer in setting goals, making aspirations and setting dreams. Believing in the impossible and seeing it turn into reality is one of the most beautiful miracles of life. For this reason, 2014 is my year of choosing to truly focus on my dreams. You see, God placed this dream in my life and I have been comfortable in the place I am rather than adventuring out into the unknown. 

For so long I have felt like a failure in my walk with Christ. I can walk the walk and talk the talk, but I feel as though there is something internally missing inside of me. There is this deep desire for intimacy with my creator and I have been stagnant and comfortable in the motions of life. Somewhere along the lines I have lost my focus. 

Have you ever put a spoon inside of a glass of water?

Seriously though, have you? Because I have…many many times. I am always amazed at how unfocused and how distorted the spoon becomes when you put it inside the water and move it around inside the glass. What was seems to no longer be. It’s a mind trick actually because the refractions of the water make the spoon look like a different size. It magnifies it. It causes it to be unfocused. 

In the same way, my life has been the spoon in this glass called life. I have been in the haze and I have felt so lost, distorted, unfocused. I have felt like what I was meant to be doing, where I was supposed to be, I was not actually doing. I have felt lost. I have felt confused. I have felt the way you feel after you spin in circles a million times and try to walk a straight line. 

Dazed and Confused

Through everything, I’ve realized one thing, life is still beautiful. Every step, every obstacle is set in my path to make me stronger so that I can overcome and grow. I am stronger each day. Even when I feel broken, when I feel like a mess I can have peace knowing that as my good friend David Allen recently spoke into my life “Brokenness is not a bad thing. It lead you right to the feet of Jesus, where you find everything you need. And God loves messy people they have always been the ones he uses.” And I may be messy, but Lord use me!

Recently, I found out my best friend has chronic liver disease. Talk about shattering my focus. Talk about instant brokenness. I have not been able to even function properly because it was the absolute last thing I thought was wrong with her. We were prepared for kidney issues, we were prepared for anything to do with PCOS, and we were prepared for endometrioses and even the possibility of ovarian cancer. She had done the research with her symptoms and liver disease had never even come up in the list and to our blind surprise that is what she has been diagnosed with. I didn’t know how to handle it and I didn’t show any real emotions at the time but I’ve been a wreck.  But if there is one thing I know, it is that Jesus is greater than any news the doctors may give us. He is the true Physician. He is Healer and even during this time of uncertainty, I can trust that God has Samantha in His hands. So in the end, my focus hasn’t been shattered, it’s been redirected to the Cross. My focus has been redirected to the feet of Jesus where I will find everything I need.

2014, is my year of choosing to refocus my eyes on the Cross. It is at the Cross that I will find all that I need…as the old hymn says:

At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day!