Quotes about Focus

One of satan's most successful devices is to preoccupy us with "good" things to distract us from the "right" things.

by the effective use of one's time.

The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object. We

Worship is humble and glad; worship forgets itself in remembering God; worship celebrates the truth as God's truth, not its own. True worship doesn't put on a show or make a fuss; true worship isn't forced, isn't half-hearted, doesn't keep looking at its watch, doesn't worry what the person in the next pew is doing. True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.

Moral effort needs mental effort, and the mental effort needs to be focused on that victory and turned into prayer for the victory to be applied today and tomorrow. The sacraments will help here, but spiritual guidance and counsel will help a great deal too.

The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object.

Frequently, I will read one or two selections from a devotional book as a means of tuning my heart before I open the Scripture. These books, written by human authors, should never take the place of the Word of God itself, but they can help us focus on spiritual matters and clear out any clutter that may be distracting to us.

It urges us to set our minds "on things that are on earth," not on things above (Col. 3:2).

All successful people have a goal. No one can get anywhere unless he knows where he wants to go and what he wants to be or do.

The "how" thinker gets problems solved effectively because he wastes no time with futile "ifs" but goes right to work on the creative "how".