Eye on the Target

"Keep your eye on the ball!"

Let me just be honest with you. I am not very athletic. I’m not even a little athletic. My father used to lovingly tell me that coordination strikes every ten seconds, and one of these days it would strike me! When I was told to keep my eye on the ball, I would watch it right up until I missed it – or it hit me. There have only been two exceptions to my lack of athletic ability. I was a successful college intramural floor hockey goalie (after all, who wants to get hit by a hockey puck?!), and I absolutely love racquetball.

But, I’m not making my point by rambling on about my lack of athletic abilities. My point relates more to the "eye on the ball" idea.

I rotate among several exercise options, mainly because I hate exercise and the rotation keeps it a little easier to endure. One of those options is a workout for the Wii, and one of the options on the Wii workout is tennis. A "machine" shoots the tennis ball at you and you are expected to hit it and knock down a target.

When completing that part of my workout routine, I have tried to follow all of my "training" by keeping my eye on the ball. But, whenever I do, I miss the target. I’ll hit the ball just fine, but I will knock it out to one side or the other or even hit the machine! Whatever the case, I almost always miss the target.

But if I keep my eye on the target, just glancing occasionally at the ball itself to see when it is going to arrive, I hit the target almost every time (well, as long as my "wii-mote" is aligned properly!).

I miss the target a lot in life. And I think it just might have to do with the fact that I tend to watch the balls racing toward me instead of watching the target.

What’s the target? Becoming more like Christ. Faith. Trust. Obedience. Working toward the ultimate goal of eternity.

What are the balls? I’m sure you could list those as easily as I can. Life throws fastballs at us all the time. Daily. Sometimes even hourly. And the mass influx of balls becomes all we see. We lose sight of the target and therefore miss it every time.

What balls are distracting your focus right now? We can’t ignore them. We can’t deny them. They come at us continuously and with quite a determined force. If we deny their existence, we’ll only be flattened by them. But, we also cannot afford to let them consume our attention. Our eyes must be on the target instead. On our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Only then will we "hit" our target…every single time.