What You Need to Pay Attention To in a Hurricane and in Life More Than Anything Else

It’s happened twice in two weeks.  Someone has run into my car.  The first time someone backed into it while I was dropping my son at school.  And this past Wednesday, I was the fourth car in a cascade of rear end hits.  Thankfully in both cases, my car had no damage.   But it reminded me. Those things can happen so easily.  And they can be so scary.  

A little more than six months ago a car slammed into me.  It pushed me so hard, that I hit another car heading the opposite direction.  The whole time, my son was sitting in the back in his car seat.  Ever since that day, I don’t enter an intersection without paying serious attention.  I don’t want that to ever happen again.  

But here’s what scares me.  I know how easy it is to lose that focus, to stop paying attention.   And today, paying attention seems harder than ever.   My phone beeps at me way too often.  And let’s be honest, it doesn’t have to beep to distract me.  I let it distract me without any beeps at all.   My son can tell you that.  How many times, he has told me; “Daddy put down your phone!” 

And with this hurricane, it can capture our thoughts even after we’ve made the preparations, done everything we need to do.  And you can understand that sort of distractedness.  It’s a hurricane after all But like the dangers of the road or the lure of the cell phone, it points to a deeper issue.  Too often, we’re paying attention to the wrong things.  

Let’s say, stressed out by the hurricane, I yell at my family.  Here’s the difference.  The hurricane passes, but my family doesn’t.  Do you get what I mean?  Have you ever focused on people or situations that in the end weren’t that important, and missed the people or things that were?  Too often you and I minimize those things.  And that is dangerous.  I’ve seen folks not paying attention like that, and big crashes come.  Their marriages crash.  Their friendships crash.   They crash, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.  

And ultimately those crashes happen, because people aren’t paying attention to the One reality that keeps life from just those types of crashes.  And when this distraction lives in your life, it messes up everything.  It messes up you in ways nothing else will.   What distraction has that power?  More crucially how do you make sure you’re not letting that distraction happen?   How do you make sure that you’re paying attention to the most important Reality of all?   In these short sentences, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Exodus 20:1-3

How do you pay attention?  How do you pay attention so that the big crashes don’t happen; the ones that crash careers, that crash relationships, that crash you?   In these words, God tells you.  God says.   Pay attention to me. 

God doesn’t say that because God has a craving for attention.  God is saying it because God knows how dangerous not paying attention there can be.  When you lose touch with God, you’re losing touch with reality at its deepest level.  And once you do that, it becomes all too easy to go off track everywhere.     

For the Israelites in the desert, all they had was God.  So it was easier to stay focused.   But Moses is giving these commandments as they get ready to once cross over into Canaan, the Promised Land.  There they’ll be living a whole different lifestyle.  They’ll need to become farmers.   And all the neighboring peoples will tell them.  To be successful farmers, you’ll need to please these fertility gods and goddesses.  You’ve got to give the sacrifices, do the rituals, get those gods working for you.   That’s the way farming is done.  

And in their insecurity, in their desire to belong, God knows.  It will be easy to get distracted.  They’ll be tempted to squeeze God out, not a lot but enough to accommodate some of these new realities (which ironically aren’t actually real at all. They’re false!)  So, as they enter the land, God makes it crystal clear.  Pay attention.  Don’t lose your focus on me.   If you do, you’ll lose focus everywhere.  You’ll start down a road that leads to nothing but destruction and despair.  

And if you read on in the story, you’ll know.  They do lose their focus.  And every time they do, it costs them.  They hurt others.  They hurt themselves.  It does lead to destruction and despair.  And it all begins because they stop paying attention.  And that same lack of attention will bring the same damage and heartache to us.     

I grew up a preacher’s kid.  And my preacher dad got consumed by that work at the church.   He craved the recognition it gave, the status it carried.  Succeeding at it, doing it right often dominated his life    And, that meant that we, his kids got less important.   So, when he was home, he often wasn’t.  A problem at church could made him irritable, even scary at times.   And my dad at the time, thought he was paying attention to God.  But he wasn’t.  He was paying attention to other people, to their approval, to an image of success.   Those things became other Gods competing for attention.   And the more my dad paid attention there, the less he paid attention to the real God, to the God who called him to that work to begin with. 

I have sympathy for my dad.  Why? His false gods have often become my false gods.  I yearn for the approval of others, especially in my work.  And it tempts me to neglect my own family, the family that God says again and again has to come first.   I tell myself.  I’m paying attention to God.  But I’m not.  I’m paying attention to anything but God. 

But this distraction doesn’t only happen to preachers.  Everyone violates this commandment.  That’s why God put it as number one.  It’s because before you break any of the other nine, you always break this one first.  Think about it.     

Can you remember a time when certain fears controlled your life, when your fears factored more in your choices than your love?  When have you been besieged by worry? Or by insecurities? Or by a destructive habit or behavior that you couldn’t let go of?  Or how about those times when something or someone else held your attention instead of the most important people in your life? 

When those things, and the list could go on, have power, you’ve stopped paying attention to God.  You’ve lost your focus.   Here’s the truth.  When you and I are not loving the people around us, we’ve stopped loving God.  Loving God and loving others always go together.

In the days ahead, as this storm hits, remember that.  Remember where your attention needs to ultimately go.  Pay attention to God.    Years ago, I read this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And today it rings truer than ever.   Emerson wrote.  The wise person in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear.  It is the storm within that endangers, not the storm without.

Basically, Emerson was saying, pay attention to God.  And the more you do that, the more the real storm, the one within you quiets.  The more you know the peace that passes understanding. 

And you can pay attention to that God, because that God has never paying attention to you.  In fact, this God loves you so much, that in Jesus he even came down.  He came down even to death.  And at the cross, in Jesus, God defeated death forever.  God freed you from slavery, from slavery to death, to fear, to every false thing that draws you away from life. 

That is the liberation, the deliverance that the gospel of Jesus proclaims.   So, as this storm prepares to hit, pay attention to the God who entered the ultimate storm for you, who has stilled the wind and the waves, and whose love has even conquered death.  And as you experience his love, his grace, then his Spirit within you will show you the way.   So, pay attention to this beautiful, loving God.  Taste and see his love for you.  Let it fill you up to you want no more.  In the name of the God who loved us first, who died to set us free, and who can do more even in the fiercest storms of our life than anything we could ask or imagine.  Amen.