Undistracted: Capture Your Purpose. Rediscover Your Joy.

by Bob Goff

A thousand such unnoticed distractions are getting in the way of your joy and preventing you from living with the kind of focused purpose that will produce the life you are longing for.

Sometimes we are so busy looking up and looking forward trying to figure out the next moves in our lives—or looking backward at all the places we have been—that we don’t look down and figure out where we actually are.

I am not prone to seeing the devil around every corner, but I am starting to see he has got a clever ploy. I don’t think he wants to destroy us with an obvious, all-out frontal assault. No, I think evil wants to distract us from expressing our gifts and doing what we are meant to do.

We need to block our view of the things that hardly matter at all, stop returning to the patterns that do not serve our larger objectives, start recognizing what is temporary and transitory, and instead focus intensely on the things that will last forever: our faith, our families, and our purposes. When you direct your attention to these things, you will find your joy.

The way to beat distraction is to become captivated by something much bigger and much better, such as purpose and joy.

Decide in advance that you will do whatever it takes to get your heart right, and then do it—even if it will kill all previous versions of you.

The clarity of purpose, undistracted energy, selfless love, and unselfish pursuits you bring to the world will be your legacy. Everything else will look like a distraction by comparison.

We all have pockets. It’s what we put in them or keep in them that can become distractions. Regrets, resentment, hurts, and misunderstandings are all things that can become huge distractions.

Don’t let the darkness of your circumstances or the surprises you encounter distract you from your destination. Level the wings, climb a little higher, look for the glow of home, then aim for it.

If we want to live more undistracted lives, we need to get real and admit that busyness is actually hijacking our joy.

The only script God has for us is Jesus.

Some of us might need to ask ourselves why we keep heading for the predictability and obscurity of the rafters rather than moving a little closer to the action.

They are looking at your life through the lens of their needs, not yours.

Stalking Jesus looks like a bunch of knowledge without an equal portion of action.

I think some people in our faith communities have quiet times because someone told them they were supposed to. Then if they don’t make time, they feel guilty. God never mentions quiet time in the Bible, and frankly, I don’t think He cares if we have it or not. What I think He wants is for us to spend undistracted time with Him all the time.

First, hearing your name called out doesn’t always mean God has sent someone your way. Some people are just distractions to you.

Second, just because we have an opportunity to do something doesn’t mean it’s what God has in mind for us.

Third, anyone who stands at our door and knocks isn’t necessarily Jesus.

But when it comes to our faith, false beliefs can become distractions that have the power to rob us of a lifetime of clarity and purpose.

The Bible describes faith as “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

I think most of us want our faith to be simply more real, more dynamic, and more connected to the people around us. The problem is, we don’t use what we already have to get what we really need. We complicate our lives and distract ourselves with things we don’t need or want. We live in a community of people yet we live like hermits. We have families who love us but we live like we’re alone. We think we can trade good conduct for God’s grace, but we can’t and when we try to, it makes us look like orphans. We all want our faith to look like it’s working, but we overlook the beauty and authenticity of letting the people around us know when we are lost and hurting.

The trouble is that we don’t always get to choose what we believe about ourselves. Much of it is imprinted on us by our parents, pastors, teachers, and friends before we have the wherewithal to say, “Hey, wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right.” Later, we spend a lot of time and exert a lot of emotional energy trying to untangle the stories we’ve been told or to fill in the gaps for the stories no one will tell us.