Distractions ...

Friday, May 9, 2014. What is currently in your focus? What is it that occupies your mind and your thoughts? Is it a relationship? Is it your work? What is it that your thoughts come back to again and again?

What distracts me …

It is fascinating to observe what keeps our mind busy, what catches our mind and keeps it like locked in a little room. Often, we are hurt, or we try to establish our selves, or we try to reach something or get into a relationship with someone. Love can occupy our mind, and keep us completely absorbed. But there are many other things as well …

Work can occupy your mind. Some try to build up their company - either having a little shop at the corner, which you need to work for from 8 to 8 every day. Or you have a dynamic enterprise doing software, and you spend many nights every month in some hotels around the globe, talking to customers and carrying out projects.

My own mind has been quite occupied by the many tasks and challenges which I have in my research environment. Caring for about 25 researchers, with complex systems to be programmed and maintained for national service, you can easily spend every hour of the day on this! There are highly fascinating questions to be solved - observing the earth from space, and from ground based remote sensing stations, and from airplanes and radiosondes … and then puting all these data into a big simulation code to predict the movement of the atmosphere every three hours. It CAN occupy your mind.

Distractions from true life …

I have no problem with life being fascinating, with great music, great dance, great science. I see no problem with big business, with engineering and economy, with politics and power. We need to deal with all of this, it is part of life.

But things are not meant to completely occupy us. We are not just music and dance and science. We are first of all humans, who are created and are made to live in a relationship to the eternal God. He has created a fascinating world for us, to live in it and enjoy it. If we live in it and forget about him, then suddenly the things take a place which they do not deserve. They become the “most important” part of our life. But the most important part is him, not any fascinating part of the world.

In fact, it is crucial to develop the relationship to the Lord. Faith is important. Only within this relationship, you will develop a healthy way to deal with the fascinating as well as difficult things in this world. Only HE has enough strength and wisdom to guide you through the various challenges of life, positive and negative! Only his presence can save you from falling into wrong illusions of power or meaning and stay tuned to full humanity. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts