One of the main themes I hear when speaking with people deals with their inability to focus on Jesus and the things of God. As this was something that I was experiencing at the time, it made me seek God on what was it that was making it so hard for people to focus on Him. I mean, it doesn’t seem to make the most sense, especially if people really are seeking God. I love Jesus, and each day I rest in what He did for me on the cross, as my strength fails me every time I try to lean on it. But even though I love Him, there’s times when it gets ridiculously hard to focus on Him.

While I’m reading or even trying to pray, random thoughts begin to come to mind. Most of them from recent days. Billboards, ads on the internet, places that I went that week, and other things that I saw. Its literally like our eyes are like automatic cameras that are shooting thousands of shots each minute. When I started to seek God for wisdom concerning this problem, He began to show me how our minds can only bring forth certain images at any given time. In other words, amongst all of the things that we have going on in our heads, we only have the capacity to focus only certain ones. Now let me get back to this.

Aside from billboards and other advertisements that we take mental images of, all of our five faculties are at work to contribute to the images in our head. Take for instance everything that we hear. When we hear a song, or when someone tells us a story, the images that the singer or storyteller are portraying begin to take form in our head. So if we closed our eyes and listened to a song, we’d begin to see what the person is describing in that song. This happens all the time to all of us. Another example are the words we read. From magazine articles, blog posts, to chapters in a book, whenever we read something, our mind immediately begins to construct images in our head based on what we’re reading.

What I’m describing above is the human condition – has nothing to do with our socio-economic status, age, religious affiliation or sexual orientation. Everyone’s brain responds to verbal or written words, along with pictures, videos and other media.

Now let me explain how this impacts our ability to focus on Jesus. Since Jesus doesn’t walk among us as He did 2,000 years ago, our ability to get to know Him as a person and spend time with Him, is 100% dependent on words, and the images that those words create in our heads. The proof of this is that many people see Jesus differently, and most people don’t see Him rightly because of a failure to acknowledge this way that our brains work.

To summarize this, I’m asking you to consider that our brain is comprised of every image we’ve consumed over the past several months, years, decades, and that our brain stores these images farther and farther back the less that we call on them (or are reminded of them). Its a lot like a computer hard drive, with new folders and files for everything that we intake through our five senses. So when we put the words that we read in the Bible, and the descriptions of Jesus that we hear through conversation or songs, and match that up against the amount of non-Jesus images that we have in our head, we’ll quickly conclude that they are far outnumbered. The good news is that this is something that’s within our control. Considering this helps us realize why it seems so difficult to focus on Jesus in prayer, or focus on scripture when reading.