By Steven Norris
It is embarrassing to admit, but I can get easily distracted. Maybe it is a character flaw or just a part of my personality makeup, but there are days that it frustrates me to no end. I need to get things done and all I seem to do is get off-track by the circumstances of the day. Too often, I sacrifice the important on the altar of the urgent. Other times, the lure of temptation causes me to take my eyes off the Way of Jesus and to focus on my own sinful desires.
If Jesus is calling us to walk a different way — a way that leads to abundant life and human thriving, why do we struggle to stay on track? If the scripture is clear that we are “dead to sin” (see Romans 6), why do we still struggle with it so often? I feel like Hollywood gave us a beautiful insight to this question in the 1994 masterpiece, “The Shawshank Redemption.”
For those unfamiliar with the story, it tells of a man who is imprisoned for a murder he denied committing and the community that forms around him in prison. One of the characters, a man named Brooks, is the prison librarian. He gets paroled after being behind bars most of his life. He cannot handle the thought of living life as a free man, so he attacks another inmate to try to stay behind bars. The guys are talking it over.
Red (played by Morgan Freeman) says: “Brooks ain’t no bug. He’s just…just institutionalized…The man’s been in here fifty years, Heywood. Fifty years! This is all he knows. In here, he’s an important man. He’s an educated man. Outside, he’s nothin’! Just a used up con with arthritis in both hands. Couldn’t even get a library card if he applied. You see what I’m saying?…These walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.”
And maybe that’s where we find ourselves: institutionalized in our sin. We are distracted because it is the only way of life we know, because we don’t recognize the truth of our new identity in Christ. When Jesus called the disciples, they left their nets and their old life behind. These were good things that got left in the dust because Jesus knew that this calling would demand their undivided attention. Ultimately, Jesus would call them to take up their cross — to die to their sin — in order to follow his way.
The book of Proverbs lies at the heart of the Hebrew wisdom literature. In this collection of sayings, we find this gem: “Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.” (Proverbs 4:25-27).
What distractions do you or I need to leave behind so that we might give our full attention to Walking the Way of Christ? How do we need to simplify our day-to-day lives to make room for that kind of focus? How might our experience of God’s Spirit change as a result?