It is easy to get distracted. You don’t even have to have ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder, to fall victim. Right now the biggest distracters for most people are their electronic devices. Researchers are discovering that our sleep is suffering as we wake either in anticipation of a text or to respond to a text. This is especially true for younger people, but we older folks aren’t exempt from this distraction. They have also found that many of us watch TV and play with another device at the same time. We aren’t content to just do one thing. We now need multiple things going on at the same time in order to feel alive. Maybe they will come up with a new disorder, Attention Distraction Disorder!
Life becomes difficult because life requires focus for most people. If there isn’t immediate positive feedback, the little bells and chimes of the cell phones and online games, then we get stimulation depraved and we reach for the electronics to get our fix.
Jesus likens these distractions to weeds that grow up around the seed. In our parable the seed is planted, it begins growing, but it doesn’t bring any fruit because the weeds choke it out. The growth potential gets stifled. There are plants, but they are of no use, since they didn’t produce their crop. They took up space, sun, water, and nutrients, but they didn’t fulfill their intended purpose. They look as though they are going to bring fruit, but that hope is not fulfilled.
Notice what happens. The cares of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth, not wealth itself, gets them in trouble. Wealth promises so much, but it delivers very little of what is really meaningful and eternal. But it can also solve many of the day to day cares and concerns. Paying the bills, keeping your head above water, can be a full time concern, especially when you see the big waves coming. But there is a fine line between our view of wealth and letting it deceive us. We can begin to think that wealth can solve all our problems, rather than the LORD.
And yet we live in the middle of wealth. Money touches every area of our lives. Every day we must fight this battle to keep from being distracted by the pull of wealth. And when they get distracted, they stop producing fruit. It makes no sense to waste seed if you are not going to get and crop. If you don’t produce grain you miss the whole goal of planting.
People who get distracted don’t fulfill the design the LORD has for their life. Their life is wasted.
The Arnold Journey 