FOCUS

Can I have your attention please?

In our world of tik toks, video games and iphones many things are constantly
competing for our attention. However if we truly wish to be more like Christ our
undivided attention is necessary. The glory of God consists partly in the fact that he,
unlike the gods of wood and stone, pays attention to his people (1 Kings 18:29; 2
Chronicles 7:15; Psalm 34:15). No distraction averts his gaze; no interruption snaps
his focus. The true God is a perfectly attentive God — and when we offer our full
attention to others, we look a little like him.
At the same time, of course, our attention is amazingly unlike God’s. God can give
his full focus to unlimited places at once; we must choose what deserves our
attention and what does not. God’s sight can range through all space and time; our
two little forward-facing eyes (four in my case) our sight here and now. God can
walk through the million-acre orchard of life and see every piece of fruit; we must
stop before this tree, this branch, this apple.
That means human attention is one of the most precious gifts we have to give. By
it, we offer another creature the dignity of our loving regard. We humble ourselves
to know and be known. We invite someone or something to stamp us, even for just
a moment, with their unique, surprising existence. And perhaps never more so than
in an age like ours, when human attention is rare and quickly going extinct.
Lessons for Stewarding Attention
Over half a century ago, the great Martyn Lloyd-Jones said,
The world and the organizations of life around and about us make things almost
impossible; the most difficult thing in life is to order your own life and to manage
it. . . . There are so many things that distract us. . . . Every one of us is fighting for
his life at the present time, fighting to possess and master and live our own life.
(Spiritual Depression, 209)
There are so many things that distract us. Lloyd-Jones had distractions like the radio
and the morning newspaper. However, these do not compare with social media,
smartphones, the internet and television. There are applications, devices and
people constantly competing for your attention. We are all fighting for our lives —
whether we realize it or not. And fight is the right word, for the stakes are high. We
cannot follow Jesus without giving him our attention (Mark 4:24; Hebrews 2:1). We
cannot become like Jesus without attentively beholding him (2 Corinthians 3:18;
Hebrews 12:1–3). And we cannot love like Jesus without offering others our
unhurried, undistracted, calm, attentive regard.

How then can we steward our limited, precious, endangered attention? In short, by
living as humans made in the image of God, rather than as gods made in the image
of the Internet. The internet can process and store limitless information. It has
access to near limitless information. You do not. Access to the internet does not
make you the internet.
Slow down it’s not a race
A goal in my life has been to learn as much as I can about as many things as I can.
If you’re like most people in the digital age, you take in far too much information
every day — at least, far too much information to process, much less store as long-
term knowledge. You wake up every morning subtly tempted to attend to the world
as God does. And as always, those who reach for deity forfeit their humanity: by
trying to give our attention everywhere, we weaken our ability to give it
meaningfully anywhere.
We could look for support from neuroscience, which assures us that an abundance
of information, especially the kind shot at us from the Internet’s hundred firehoses,
impoverishes memory and addicts us to distraction. In his landmark 2010 book The
Shallows, for example, Nicholas Carr writes, “The influx of competing messages that
we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it
makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one
thing” (194).
But neuroscience only confirms the anthropology we find in Scripture. Humans are
far more tree-like than computer-like: information becomes knowledge and wisdom
only as fast as water becomes fruit on the branch. Water cannot travel into roots
and up trunks and through limbs in a moment; it takes time, and often requires the
painfully slow process of meditation (Psalm 1:3). An abundance of information
processed rapidly makes for distracted, superficial souls; a limited amount of
information processed slowly makes for knowledge and that increasingly rare
quality so lauded in Scripture: wisdom.
Consider, then, simplifying your inputs. Read less but read for understanding. Learn
less but become a master of what you have learned. Listen to less but meditate on
what you have heard. You cannot eat all the apples in life’s information orchard;
you would be foolish to try. So make peace with your gloriously limited humanity,
and learn to choose and savor just a few.
Prioritize near over far.
For most of history, humans had no choice but to give their attention to those
people and things that lay near at hand. Adam and Eve not only did not know what

was happening outside Eden; they could not know. There was no traveling bloggers
back then or Youtubers to give them the real story. So, what could they do but
spend their waking hours devoted to what they could see?
Today, we are just as limited as our first parents, with just as many hours in the day
and just as much capacity for focus, but with billions more objects vying for our
attention. We no longer need concern ourselves with people who can talk back or
with the sensory world. We can spend all our time on the digital side of the globe.
Such availability, however, has not fundamentally changed our responsibility.
Though we can know nowadays about matters far beyond the garden called home,
God still holds us responsible, first and foremost, for how well we love, care for, and
attend to those people and callings within arm’s reach.
There was a time this never needed to be stated because it was inevitable and
unavoidable. The Ephesians were to care for the whole church’s households, but
especially for their own (1 Timothy 5:8). The Galatians were to do good to all, but
especially to fellow believers (Galatians 6:10). Israel fell under judgment, not for
neglecting Edom’s poor, but the poor within their own gates (Amos 8:4–6).
We must prioritize near over far. If you are a normal, busy person, your nearest
circles likely need all the attention you can give. Few of us can attend well to
spouse and children, church members and neighbors, while also attending well to
digital controversies, international news, and high-school friends’ Instagram posts.
Something must give, and we need not feel guilty for prioritizing the near over the
far.
Do not just observe the story, be part of it
The muscle of attention strengthens or atrophies, in part, during everyday, ordinary
moments. What do you do when you arrive somewhere five minutes early, or when
you wait in line at the grocery store? Like so many, I find myself reaching for my
shiny pocket rectangle, that beloved window into distant realms. But this window is
also a shutter, closing my eyes to the realm right in front of me.
Creation has grown dim to many. We observe without seeing and hear without
listening. The world’s ecstasies have become a background hum; the color
spectrum has turned to shades of gray. We have grown unrighteously unlike the
God of Psalm 104, that Wonderer who never grows weary of gushing springs and
valley beasts, branched birds and growing grass, schools of fish and the hidden
deeps (Psalm 104:10–11, 12, 14, 25–26).
We have also become unlike the attentive Jesus, that Psalm-104 God made flesh. He
had a way of noticing what others only saw, didn’t he? The disciples saw some birds

and flowers; he noticed God’s fatherly hand (Luke 6:22–31). The crowds saw seeds
and yeast; he noticed the coming kingdom (Matthew 13:31–33). The multitudes saw
a blind beggar; Jesus noticed Bartimaeus himself, in all his desperate need (Mark
10:46–52).
Meditate on the word
Scripture’s charge to “pay attention” almost always includes God or his words as
the object. So, he calls his people to pay attention to “all that I have said to you”
(Exodus 23:13), “my words” (Jeremiah 6:19), “the prophetic word” (2 Peter 1:19), or
simply, “me” (Isaiah 51:4). Yet when we give him our attention, we find that he has
already given us his (Psalm 34:15).Perhaps many need a Hagar moment, a moment
of waking up to the presence of El-Roi, the God who sees us (Genesis 16:13) — and
in Christ, the God who sees us graciously, ever and always. We do not find, when
we look to him, a God who gives us half his attention, or half of himself, but all: his
full gaze, under his full grace, now and for endless ages.
Nothing so shapes our attention like living — daily, adoringly — in the loving
attention of God. Turn your eyes upon him at first rising, and see his eyes turned to
you. Speak to him in the day’s silenced, and find his ear open. Return to him before
shutting your attention off for the night, and then lie down knowing his will not.

WRITTEN BY ANTON BURDEN