Focus 3.16.2023

    I’m supposed to write about maintaining focus this week; and what a week to address that topic. So far, we’ve had:

1. Late night ER trip for my wife.

2. Continued late, feverish nights from a kidney stone.

3. Follow-up trip to the family Dr. 

4. Additional work to prepare a funeral sermon this week.

5.    Umm, March Madness.

    That does not even consider the “normal” interruptions that characterize a typical day or week in ministry. Telephone calls to address ongoing Pastoral issues. Taking care of a benevolence issue. Contacting others involved in the Memorial Service I’m conducting this Saturday. Working with my volunteer administrative team to streamline our procedures for when we hire a new Administrative Assistant. By the way, I just sat back down after meeting with one of those volunteers—even while I draft this essay.

Good preaching takes focus because the difficult, deep, and detailed work that undergirds good preaching still needs to get done, even when time is short—especially when time is short. The question then is how to remain focused when good deeds and good intentions threaten to soak up the time necessary for the best thing we do, which is preaching the Word.

 Enough Rope

When things get crazy you can’t just order up more time. Doesn’t work that way. Sorry. The key is to build margin into your processes and schedule so that you always have allocated more time than a task will actually take. What seems like an exorbitant luxury most weeks will be a lifesaver during times of crisis or unexpected incoming. 

For example, my time budget for my current sermon series from Mark is three hundred hours. The formula I use to arrive at that figure is 20 hours per sermon x 15 Sermons=300 hours. Now, much of that budget was invested long before the first sermon was written. Specifically, (Yes, I just did the math on hours spent on “preliminary Marcan Study” from the first notice in November until the first sermon was preached on January First) 60 hours were spent working on Mark before I began to work on the first sermon. That leaves 16 hours per sermon left in my budget for each sermon in the series. Now here is the secret…It doesn’t take 16 hours for me to research, draft, edit, polish, and complete a sermon. My customary practice is to take 1 hour on Sunday afternoon to set up the week and then to work straight through on Monday to complete the message. Now, if I know that it takes around eight hours to complete a sermon (assuming through background research before the series began) why do I allocate twenty hours for it in my time budget? I want to make sure I have enough rope. It is impossible to make an 80-foot rope do 120 feet worth of work, but a 120-foot rope provides enough margin for 80 feet worth of work. 

Don’t Sit too Close to the TV!

    “You’ll go blind if you sit that close to the TV.” Thousands of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies barely heard these dismal parental prophecies because our faces were plastered up against the TV screen. How else could you listen to what was going on and pay close attention to the action when your younger siblings were screaming and hitting you up aside the head with an etch-a-sketch? We sat close to the TV so that we could pay better attention. Our parents were right about it being risky but wrong about the nature of the risk.

    Remaining riveted on a subject for a prolonged amount of time requires increasing effort for diminishing returns. In addition to margin in your schedule you need slack. Margin means having more than enough rope to get the job done. Slack means not keeping that rope so tight that it loses flexibility and strength. When we are under stress and trying to meet deadlines, we already have the adrenaline flowing. When we continuously lean into the work and “sit as close to the TV” as we can, forgoing breaks, or even taking our eyes off our work we risk arresting the close attention we intend to give our subject. Eventually, we begin to feel fatigued, our eyes get sore, and attention wanes even when there is still work to do. 

    You must build slack into your daily schedule. Every 60 minutes of your butt in the chair must be interrupted by 5 to 10 minutes of looking away. Personally, I try to get up and take 1,000 steps every 60-90 minutes. This is how I exercise and create slack in my schedule. Each task we pursue in sermon study and writing requires an investment of concentration and time. There are times when circumstances put us in chronological distress, and we must just muscle through. This should be an exception. Our common rule should be to have enough slack time built into our schedule so that we are able to be relaxed and focused rather than tense and distractible. 

Check!

    When you have enough rope, and maintain slack so that it maintains tensile strength, then you can accurately measure how much you must accomplish and how much time remains to accomplish it. I have and will continue to recommend that you use a checklist to keep track of time spent, tasks accomplished, and to-dos remaining.  There is no point in having more than enough time if you don’t have any idea what you have done and what remains to be done. 

    It does not matter how busy you are, the most debilitating issue is stress. Focus is the ability to neutralize stress, limit tension, and keep your attention on the task at hand. You must remain relaxed, so your effectiveness does not diminish as you do the work. There is no point in investing twelve consecutive hours of work in a project if the last four are ineffective due to increasing stress and fatigue.

Focus

    Focus is a process. It is more than a state of mind or an act of will. Focus requires understanding the task of preaching from the pulpit backward throughout the entire process of preparation. You may not spend Monday in your study with your younger brother whacking you in the head with a wiffleball bat, but you will have other interruptions, diversions, and distractions. Monday’s focus begins with margin, slack, and planning.