being blindsided. It keeps you from being preoccupied, from
overlooking important facts that would’ve been readily
obvious if you’d only been paying better attention. Focus
protects your goals and dreams from being consumed in small
bites, stolen right out from under your nose in twenty-minute
segments of compromise.
And focus is the antenna that prayer helps to keep raised
and alert, making you keenly aware if somebody’s trying to
play you for a fool.
And your enemy—for his strategy against you to work—is
dead set on being able to succeed at just that. On fooling you.
Faking you out. Pulling your eye toward a side stage on the
theater platform, diverting your focus, trying to convince you
that the main issues in your life actually originate over there,
anywhere, or with anyone except where they really do. He
wants you focused on things that are physical and visible
instead of where the action really is. “Pay no attention,” in
other words, “to the man behind the curtain.”
Reminds me of one of the more creative displays I’ve ever
seen at the annual trunk-or-treat kids’ festival a church in my
neighborhood hosts during the fall. One guy connected a