How God Meets Wandering Minds
From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
Acts 17:26-27
I was recently writing a submission for a Christian publication on the season and practices of Lent, and in putting together some research I found myself looking through a book I had read and greatly enjoyed years ago called How to Do Nothing. In it, author Jenny Odell discusses the ramifications of what she calls the “attention economy,” the network of strategists, corporations, and applications that have worked tirelessly to gain our attention and hold it to their great profit.
Many studies have been done to examine what contemporary means of information exchanging have done to our minds and our relationships (Nicholas Carr’s fascinating The Shallows comes to mind), but Odell’s work is unique in that it focuses on how this new kind of economy has really just exploited how we are wired to function. The nature of our attention is always to wander to the new and the open.
I think we can feel this in our spiritual lives. Where once certain practices and disciplines inspired our closeness to God, they can quickly become the stuff of boring routine, or even worse, appear to be the thing preventing our closeness to God. Our attention (and affection, if we’re being honest) eventually moves on, often before we notice or are willing to accept.
In her book, Odell quotes an old physicist and physician named Hermann von Helmholtz, who made some observations concerning distraction after putting his own brain to various tests of attention:
The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.
Never before in history has humanity had so much opportunity to let attentions wander. The rabbit trails imaginations used to chase on their own go farther than ever with access to social media or even random Google searches. Odell says that in a world like this, focusing presents like a kind of rebellion. “What passes for sustained attention,” she writes, “is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency.”
This isn’t to say that focusing on something should feel like torture. Quite the opposite. Things worthy of our attention are worth meditating over. They’re deep and profound. And they reward our focus with perspective and value and gratitude.
Anybody in a strong relationship knows this. People are deep and dynamic. When we allow for that, friendships are sustained over long seasons, even years, of discovering that there is more to learn about those we already love.
If this is true of our friends, how much truer is it of Jesus? I love what von Helmholtz says above. Keeping our attention, even on things we love, requires us to “seek constantly to find out something new.” The beauty for us as believers is that there is always something new to learn about the God who first loved us.
The Bible tells us over and over that God’s ways and wisdom are beyond what we could fathom, but it also tells us that He longs to reveal himself to us in our searching and seeking. Sometimes that looks like study, where we uncover profound insights into His character and truth. Sometimes it looks like repentance, where we discover the newness of His mercies when we need them most. But always it looks like hopeful resistance, where we defy “other powerful impressions… attracting us away” to fix our eyes on Jesus and see with fresh perspective the deep and wide love of God.
There are a lot of ways to imagine heaven, and surely one is like this, an eternity free from distraction and open wide to the joyful discovery of our beloved. One day it won’t require so much work for us to sustain our attention, but until that day, Jesus is worth the effort.
- Caleb Saenz
