Can you have spiritual ADD?

Today was a great Sunday, even though it was a difficult one.

For starters, I give great props to Mark, our preacher, for being in the saddle doing two sermons and usually a class each Sunday morning, and not bolting for the door immediately after. Hey, he even comes back on Sunday night!

When I do get the chance to preach, like today, it is always both a joy and something that dominates my week. It is something that becomes an outpouring of the ways that God has been working on me that week, and usually this is a good thing. This week, it almost seemed to become a form of spiritual ADD, if you'll pardon the metaphor.

I was actually diagnosed with ADD when I was a kid. It's made life interesting, especially the part where you can be completely derailed by small shiny objects or random entertainment like video games playing on loops at Best Buy. Whoever thought that idea up is a VERY BAD MAN, because you're just walking along, you know what you have to get, you're on a schedule, and it's get in, get out, and...
...Oooohh, DUDE! They're coming out with a new expansion pack for World of Warcraft!!!!! who cares if I never played it in my life! It's new and exciting and colorful and WOW. (not WoW, just WOW. ;0) )

And five minutes have gone by before you even realize that you're standing there like a slack jawed idiot fixated on something completely irrelevant to your life, and you totally have to snap out of it and get back to what's important. And you have to remember why you're in the store. And you might even have been there so long that you have to rearrange your schedule. Yep, it makes life interesting.

I think about my spiritual life sometimes in these terms and I wonder how if I have so much difficulty being focused sometimes in the physical realm how I'm supposed to stay focused in the spiritual realm.

Case in point, this Sunday. Daylight savings time does not do me any favors. I was at church, bleary eyed and latte in hand, at about 7:15. Or maybe 6:15, if you forgot to set your watch forward. Not to pump me up, but you all should know by now that I'm not exactly a morning person. It wasn't because I'm being super holy. It's because I knew with some of the stuff that's happened this week, some of it normal, some of it, like the situation with Hunter, not so normal, it was probably going to take that long just to get the focus back where it needs to be so I can be an effective mouthpiece for God.

In case you didn't know, ADD is on the rise. Now I know that we as a society tend to want to find a diagnosis for everything, and you may say that ADD wasn't a problem until we started making it an excuse for why we can't function normally. I will definitely agree with you on that point. But I don't think it's that it didn't exist, I think people learned how to adjust and live with it. They may have had some "learning disabilities", but for the most part they led fairly normal lives and learned to adjust to the norms of the world around them.

But here's the thing. Researchers are saying that one of the reasons ADD is on the rise is because our marketing and sales, even our culture, is starting to become ADD driven. More ads, larger ads. More outrageous looking things. More information coming faster than ever before. Music all day, everywhere. Sounds, sights, data flying at you all the time. Even as I am writing this I have some silly noise going off on my computer because my pop-up blocker is blocking some adware for refinancing my house or getting me cheap prescriptions from Canada or enhancing my love life or some silly thing.

Seems like when the world around us sets the norm at being unfocused, distracted, and changing course from here to there swiftly, we are prone to follow suit. I would tend to believe that it is the same in the spiritual as it is the physical realm for us as humans.

My point is simply this: I'm not doing myself any favors when I introduce lots of noise into my life and then try to focus on a single point. When I study or work, I usually have music on ( don't know what that has to say about my personality), but I can't have just anything on. I can't have my "driving music" (harder edge stuff, faster, techno, stuff like that) on. Instead I usually have chill or light instrumental. Always something with NO WORDS. I've had more than one instance in college of getting a song in my head while working, and proceeding to put half a sentence from a song into a term paper. It's about the only time I've thanked Microsoft for their grammar checking in Word, which in any other circumstance seems completely useless.

I also think we don't do ourselves a lot of favors when we introduce spiritual "noise" into our lives. You know what I'm talking about: busyness, strife, bitterness, worry, resentment, regret, guilt. The busyness especially gets us moving faster than we should in order to be able to really take notice of what God is doing in us and around us, but then it also lets our guard down, so we're ready to accept anything that any of that "noise" might want to introduce into the story of our life, and it just sneaks into the paper before we realize we've even written it. And that's just the internal noise! You start adding all the external sources, like media, materialism, gossip (boy, isn't that a huge source of distraction from loving each other and being focused on each other's well being!) , and other things like that, and your head is spinning worse than me in the Best Buy.

I guess that's why there is so much in the Word about being still. It's why our Sundays (or, if you're like me, it's Tuesdays!) really need to be Sabbath, rest, not just this day where we cram church in and then try to get done all those projects that have been nagging us all week, or catch up before it's Monday. It's why we need that time in the morning (maybe bleary eyed with our latte, maybe that extra five minutes in the shower, whatever) just to FOCUS on taking notice of the fact that God is doing something in us and with us, and maybe even through us.

I really want to do this more. To just have those times to stop and take notice. To hit the pause button and just be still. Hopefully you do to. Who knows? maybe stopping and reading this blog was one of them for you. Maybe God is using that to really get some wheels turning in our collective heads about how to do this better. I hope so.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think there's something shiny in the corner calling for my attention...