Sermon Illustrations on Focus
Background
The Frequency Illusion
You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out you’re having a baby and now you’re surrounded by pregnant women in every shopping aisle, church classroom, and train station. It’s not just you, and it is a real thing. So real, in fact, that there are actual names for it.
Known as Blue Car syndrome, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, this is when we hear or experience something and suddenly it seems to appear everywhere. It’s also called frequency illusion, which, of course, implies these things are not, in actuality, happening or appearing more often than normal, but because they have been brought to your attention, your brain notices them more often.
Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, Bethany House Publishers, 2020.
Losing to a Goldfish
Cue a terrifying trend: our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was twelve seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But since then it’s dropped to eight seconds.
To put things in perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.[i]
Yes. That’s right. We’re losing, to goldfish.
But the odds are not in our favor. There are literally thousands of apps and devices intentionally engineered to steal your attention. And with it your money.
Reminder: Your phone doesn’t actually work for you. You pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for you. You’re not the customer; you’re the product. It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind.[ii]
Adapted from The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World. Copyright © 2019 by John Mark Comer. Used by permission of WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
[i] Kevin McSpadden, “You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish,” Time, May 14, 2015, http://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish.
[ii] This idea comes from Seth Godin’s great blog post “When Your Phone Uses You,” Seth’s Blog (blog), September 30, 2016, https://seths.blog/2016/12/when-your-phone-uses-you.
Singular, Holistic Absorbtion
Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you are an astrophysicist or an astronomy buff, your experience will not likely be one of thought and analysis but of singular, holistic absorption. You will experience the presence of the starry sky, not your thoughts about it.
What is Prayer?
On a walking pilgrimage to Assisi in Italy, the writer Patricia Hampl began to make a list in answer to the question, What is prayer? She wrote down a few words. Praise. Gratitude. Begging/pleading/cutting deals. Fruitless whining and pulling. Focus. And then the list broke off, for she discovered that prayer only seems like an act of language: “Fundamentally it is a position, a placement of oneself.”
She went on to discover that “prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.” Ah, a habit of attention. Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into alignment.
Philip Yancey, Prayer: Does it Make Any Difference, Zondervan, 2006, p.25.
Stories
When are You?
I recently watched a children’s movie (Extinct, 2021) with my kids. To be fair, it probably will not receive any Academy consideration, but it was enjoyable. The story revolves around a pair of extremely cute, utterly made-up animals (Flummels, they have a big circle where their stomach should be, making them look like furry doughnuts) who time travel from the Galapagos Islands (in 1895) to present-day Shanghai, China.
I bring this all up only because there was a line in the film that has stuck with me, and perhaps may with you as well. Soon after the two Flummels arrive in Shanghai, a cute dog (acting as a guide) shows up and offers to help them navigate this strange new land. The two exclaim “WHERE ARE WE?” to which the guide responds, “the better question is “when are we?” In other words, you haven’t merely gone from one part of the planet to another, you have actually crossed the space-time continuum in a radical way.
At the time, I thought it was a funny line, but as it resonated in my head, I began to realize it could serve as a powerful analogy for our own state of consciousness. Do we live primarily in the past, wishing we could have done things differently? Or are we constantly living in a preferred alternative future…maybe a place where we are more successful, or less busy. Either way, the question, “when are you?” can act perhaps as a magnet, a compass of sorts, drawing you back to live in the present. So, the question we might ask is, “when are you?”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Studies
The Impact Noise Can have on Learning
Have you ever wondered the impact noise can have on our cognitive ability? Psychologist Arlene Bronzaft was curious to find out. Studying Public School 98 on the northern tip of Manhattan, Bronzaft found that children who were assigned to classrooms on the side of the school facing above-ground train tracks were on average, 11 months behind their counterparts on the quieter side of the school building.
After these findings were presented, the New York City Transit authority installed noise-abatement equipment on the tracks, and follow-up studies found no significant difference between the two groups.
Ari L. Goldman, Article: Student Scores Rise After Nearby Subway Is Quieted, New York Times, 1982.
Losing to a Goldfish
Cue a terrifying trend: our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was twelve seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But since then it’s dropped to eight seconds.
To put things in perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.[i]
Yes. That’s right. We’re losing, to goldfish.
But the odds are not in our favor. There are literally thousands of apps and devices intentionally engineered to steal your attention. And with it your money.
Reminder: Your phone doesn’t actually work for you. You pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for you. You’re not the customer; you’re the product. It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind.[ii]
Adapted from The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World. Copyright © 2019 by John Mark Comer. Used by permission of WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
[i] Kevin McSpadden, “You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish,” Time, May 14, 2015, http://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish.
[ii] This idea comes from Seth Godin’s great blog post “When Your Phone Uses You,” Seth’s Blog (blog), September 30, 2016, https://seths.blog/2016/12/when-your-phone-uses-you.
Analogies
The Range of What We Think and Do
In this short poem, the psychologist Daniel Goleman (the developer of the concept of Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.)) builds on the work of R. D. Laing’s “knots.” The poem is a helpful reminder that our awareness is the limitation of our understanding. Expanding our awareness helps us avoid painful blind spots:
The range of what we think and do
Is limited by what we fail to notice
And because we fail to notice
That we fail to notice
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds?
Singular, Holistic Absorption
Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you are an astrophysicist or an astronomy buff, your experience will not likely be one of thought and analysis but of singular, holistic absorption. You will experience the presence of the starry sky, not your thoughts about it.
When are You?
I recently watched a children’s movie (Extinct, 2021) with my kids. To be fair, it probably will not receive any Academy consideration, but it was enjoyable. The story revolves around a pair of extremely cute, utterly made-up animals (Flummels, they have a big circle where their stomach should be, making them look like furry doughnuts) who time travel from the Galapagos Islands (in 1895) to present-day Shanghai, China.
I bring this all up only because there was a line in the film that has stuck with me, and perhaps may with you as well. Soon after the two Flummels arrive in Shanghai, a cute dog (acting as a guide) shows up and offers to help them navigate this strange new land. The two exclaim “WHERE ARE WE?” to which the guide responds, “the better question is “when are we?” In other words, you haven’t merely gone from one part of the planet to another, you have actually crossed the space-time continuum in a radical way.
At the time, I thought it was a funny line, but as it resonated in my head, I began to realize it could serve as a powerful analogy for our own state of consciousness. Do we live primarily in the past, wishing we could have done things differently? Or are we constantly living in a preferred alternative future…maybe a place where we are more successful, or less busy. Either way, the question, “when are you?” can act perhaps as a magnet, a compass of sorts, drawing you back to live in the present. So, the question we might ask is, “when are you?”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
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