Focus is essential to any enterprise that we engage in. As the old saying goes, ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing well.’ Our society requires multitasking…which is seldom done well. Thus the pressures of family and work and faith and money and all of the unnecessary minutiae that we place upon ourselves…the Big Picture is often difficult to see. I have heard many friends and colleagues say that they do not know what they would do with themselves if they retired. Yet…these same people have been working toward retirement for a career. When the day of retirement approaches they realize that they have focused on little else than work and the rest of life is a murky mystery.

Faith requires the Big Picture. Churches couch the joys of the afterlife in the physical terms of the congregations’ earthly life. As a child, I heard that when I got to Heaven I was going to live in a mansion that sat beside a street of gold. Many churches teach their parishioners that if they follow the ministers’ teaching and give enough of their hard-earned money to the church that they will become rich in this life…and somehow carry that monetary blessing over into the next life… What of the poor among us who never had the fiscal opportunity to become wealthy…are they not equally blessed?

Easter is coming. We will celebrate the resurrection of an itinerate Jewish prophet that seemed to have very little earthly wealth or for the most part recognition by the wealthy or the religious elite of his day. We Christians celebrate Jesus as the Son of God and the Messiah that the Old Testament prophesies…however his outward appearance did not signify the brilliant radiance of his position.

‘And Jesus said to him, Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.’ Luke 9:58. KJV

First appearances are important. Often our lasting opinion of someone that we first meet…is formulated during that first meeting. May we never need to tell others that we are followers of Christ…may they see it by our lives…