Life events can push you to change your focus,

but you don’t have to wait for those events to change in fact the best time to refocus is now!

6 years ago, my life changed completely; 6 years ago, I started chemo after a sudden stage 4 diagnosis. It would be an understatement to say that this kind of experience changes your focus on, and perspective about the world. I had been hurtling along thru life with work, ministry, and family obligations galore for years. I think I was pretty tired even before I hit this moment. This was a difficult forced moment of pause and a change of focus.
Maybe today you are hurtling forward with life. Busy with work, kids, spouse, ministry, school, Facebook updates 😉, volunteering all over the place, but still feeling unquiet in your spirit as if you are missing something.

Are you tired? I don’t mean that good kind of tired that says wow something really good was accomplished. I mean that weary, “ I feel like I am doing a lot with very little at the end, but more to do” tired”. There will always be seasons of the latter in life, but I hope that it is not all of your or my life.

Where is your focus today?

• Can you see it or is your purpose remote  or not well understood?

• Maybe your journey hasn’t gone the way that you hoped.
  • How did you hope it would go?
    • Even the best of intentions can still have moments of going haywire!
      • In spite of your good intentions and even good results does it feel like something is missing?
  • Try this little experiment , take 10 minutes today and each day for the next 14 days to simply ask God thru prayer and being quiet and listening to your spirit to help you focus.
    • This takes practice, especially if like me you are constantly distractible.
    • Ask God to show up, I can guarantee God will show up in those minutes.
      • I know this because he’s already there.
  • This experiment has a purpose in allowing you to refocus on your purpose. 
    • After you pray  write three values that are important to you (not goals but values that goals point too)
    • Ask God for ways to live out those values
    • Hold on!

With this health event I started a journey, and in this journey I was confronted by the incredible need I have to focus on God.

Recently I have been given the “all clear” from my oncologist. No more CT scans every 6 months, and no more trips to meet with the oncologist every 6 months. I have felt healthy for quit a while now in reality, but there is something about hearing that it’s been 5 years, and your blood work ,and scans look healthy. With the conclusion of one journey another journey has started, but the needs are the same. I am looking for God each day whether events are going great, or there is great struggle. Whether I have cancer or I have clean bill of health.

Focus on God

In past seasons God could too often became my “help me cry” in moments of trouble, and not the God that I fall at the feet and worship. It takes time to be with God and time was not what I would give up in the past. In my recent relocation, and subsequent stay at home father role I have had to draw into God in a way that I probably have not engaged in since my early 20’s.
The only thing is, I am not in my early 20’s and a lot has happened since then. 22 years of marriage, 4 significant losses, 3 births, 4 jobs, 1 financial crisis, a health crisis, graduate school and seemingly innumerable smaller events both, amazing and joyful, and amazing and heartbreaking.

This year has been challenging. This school year my children have made some poor decisions which have required difficult correction. I have had struggles in this new role with being the husband, Father, and follower of Christ that is best. I have doubted the decision to move to a new town and take this new role. At the same time, I do not begrudge this season, or this decision for I am firmly convinced this  has been a season of transition that was needed and God directed. My focus has changed and it needed to. I have a deeper desire for my first attentions to be oriented on God and His presence.

Vital Life is about focusing on the one who wants us to have a “vital life”

Brian Houston writes in “live, Love, Lead”, that when we worship God, God becomes bigger in our hearts, and “our problems don’t have any room to grow”. I want to make that choice, not to avoid my problems, but to grow closer to my God.
As little as a year ago I would spend my weekends rushing along distracted from many things that would have renewed me for my weekly work, even fulfilling my church attendance “obligation” as another check off on the to do list. I would then start the next week again, hoping that I could make a difference, but somehow feeling like “Ground Hog Day”. I was repeating the same tough role with brief glimpses of success, but with lengthy periods of struggle.
I believe that a positive difference was made, but I frequently missed the most important part of my entire life, my focus on the one that calls me. I was doing, but not seeking, surviving, but not fully living with God. My life, my achievements, my education, my career, my surviving cancer, the struggles of my home life growing up, my losses, my children and on and on, “ I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” Philippians 3:8.

These are not the things that define me. They are part of my story, my goals pointing towards my values, but it is God revealed in these parts of my life that is the real person. It is the vision of Christ in those areas of life that are tough and beautiful, successful and full of struggle that is the real life.

Where do you see Him?

Are you looking?

Where is your focus?

I believe that my need for God and His presence is never more important than at this moment because this is the moment that I have. Out of that presence great things can happen. This is the vital life.

Gene

Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along  with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art  items that take up space and have to be noticed.