Excerpts from "Focused: A Story and a Song" by Lilias Trotter
Never has it been so easy to live in half a dozen good harmless worlds at once - art, music, social science, games, motoring, the following of some profession, and so on. And between them we run the risk of drifting about, the “good” hiding the “best” even more effectually than it could be hidden by downright frivolity with its smothered heart-ache at its own emptiness.
It is easy to find out whether our lives are focused, and if so, where the focus lies. Where do our thoughts settle when consciousness comes back in the morning? Where do they swing back when the pressure is off during the day? Does this test not give the clue? Then dare to have it out with God - and after all, that is the shortest way. Dare to lay bare your whole life and being before Him, ask Him to show you whether or not all is focused on Christ and His glory.
What does this focusing mean? Study the matter and you will see that it means two things - gathering in all that can be gathered, and letting the rest drop. The working of any lens - microscope, telescope, camera - will show you this. The lens of your own eye, in the room where you are sitting, as clearly as any other. Look at the window bars, and the beyond is only a shadow; look through at the distance, and it is the bars that turn into ghosts. You have to choose which you will fix your gaze upon and let the other go.
How do we bring things to a focus in the world of optics? Not by looking at the things to be dropped, but by looking at the one point that is to be brought out.
Turn full your soul’s vision to Jesus, and look and look at Him, and a strange dimness will come over all that is apart from Him, and the Divine “attrait” by which God’s saints are made, even in this 20th century, will lay hold of you. For He is worthy to have all there is to be had in the heart that He has died to win.
