Divided - Part 2 of 2 on 2 Timothy 2:3-4

A soldier in the middle of a battle is not thinking about what kind of bread he wants, or what kind of meat he wants on his sandwich, or what show he is going to watch before bed. Paul calls this staying free of the affairs of everyday life, so that a soldier may please the one who enlisted him, and none of that, the bread, the sandwich, the show, exists to him while the fight is in front of him, not because he does not care about any of it, but because caring about it right now would get him or someone next to him killed. I keep thinking about that verse, because most days I am not in a battle, I am sitting on the couch with Maddy, hanging out with my closest friends or my family, walking Stanley and Nellie, or sitting down with my Bible in the morning, and some other version of me is still back at camp deciding on dinner and picking something to watch.

The entanglement that never leaves the room

I struggle with this constantly, and I doubt I am the only one. I will be sitting down with Maddy, and instead of being there with her, I am running through everything I need to do around the house or at work, and by the time I notice, the moment I was supposed to be having with her is already gone. I would guess most people know that specific kind of gone, sitting across from someone you love while your head runs a list they cannot see. The same thing happens walking Stanley and Nellie, who get maybe twenty minutes of my attention a day, and I spend a good chunk of even that thinking about a million other things instead of just being with them. It happens at work too, and even in my own time in the Word, sitting with my Bible open while half of me is still working through something with a specific person or task back home, and if you have ever caught yourself doing the same thing in church or at dinner with your own family, this is the same pattern wearing a different outfit.

Productivity dressed up as virtue

The strange part is I do not experience this as laziness most of the time, I experience it as trying to be productive, and I would bet a lot of you do the same thing without ever calling it what it is. I put a podcast on in almost every free moment I have, in the car, doing chores, even walking the dogs, because it feels like I am using the time well, and the result is that I am rarely just living in any given moment, I am always consuming something on top of it. Feeling productive and being present are not the same thing, and I have spent a long time treating them like they were.

This shows up inside work itself too, not just between work and home. I will have three or four things half open at once, half thinking about one project while technically working on another, telling myself I am being efficient by running them in parallel, when in reality none of them get my full attention and all of them take longer than they would if I just did one at a time. Being fully focused on one thing for an hour beats being half focused on four things for a whole day, every time, and I know that and still default to the four most days.

Numbing instead of choosing

When I am tired, this gets worse, not better, and I imagine most people have their own version of this even if the specifics look different. I will say no to a card game with Maddy, or no to taking the dogs somewhere fun, or put off a chore sitting right in front of me, and reach for scrolling instead, because it asks nothing of me and everything else does. It is not that the chore or the game or the dogs are hard, it is that after a full day I want the one thing that requires nothing back from me, and scrolling is always willing to be that thing.

Whose attention I owe

Paul's soldier stays free of entanglement so that he may please the one who enlisted him, and I used to think that was only about what I chase. It is also about where I am. A soldier fully present in the fight in front of him is not distracted by the fight, he is completely in it, holding nothing back for later. I think about men who come home after a long day and sit in the same room as their kids without ever really arriving, phone in hand, mind still at the office, present in body only, and how much of a childhood happens in exactly those small ordinary windows that are easy to write off as filler. Whoever is in front of me right now, whatever I am doing right now, that is the assignment, and every minute I spend somewhere else in my head is a minute I am not serving the one who put me here.

Where I am with this

What helps some, when I remember to do it, is a small pause before I walk into the house or sit down or put my phone away, just long enough to name where I am and choose to be there instead of somewhere else in my head. It does not kill the pull, but it slows it down enough to matter.

Ask yourself what is pulling at your attention right now, when you are supposed to be somewhere with someone specific. Name it before you walk back in, say it out loud to whoever is with you, and let them hold you to it, because staying divided is a lot easier when no one else knows you are trying not to be.

Both halves of this, wandering eyes and wandering minds, are the same fight, staying with whoever and whatever is actually in front of me instead of everywhere else my head wants to go.