IT IS OFTEN said that when one is very orderly and focused on things, he most likely will fail to consider other things that may be more important. He becomes a rigid, one-track-minded person.
Of course, there is some truth to that observation, especially when the persons concerned precisely are too orderly and too focused that they become compulsively controlling of things and therefore end up blind to other considerations that may objectively be more important than what they are handling at the moment.
Sad to say, we have many cases like this nowadays. This may be due to the increasing complexity and complications of our life and the growing clutter not only of material things but also and especially of moral issues and concerns. As a consequence, many people react in that way as their means to cope with the situation.
But if order and focus are lived properly, they actually favor flexibility and creativity, and they can lead one to be more broad-minded, more objective and more able to tackle what is truly important to us. And the proper way to develop and live order and focus is to inspire them with love for God and others.
Without that love and with us simply relying on our own idea of what is good and advantageous to us, our way of developing and living order and focus would be greatly limited. And that’s because our own ideas of these virtues would only be self-serving and would simply depend on our own powers. We would be easy prey to the mysterious twists and turns of our life.
A self-serving motive and a self-empowerment can only do so much. They cannot go the distance. Their objectivity is hampered by a heavily subjective approach to the challenges in life. They practically cannot overcome and go beyond what their current conditionings and circumstances give them. They are like being fenced in.
But when the sense of order and focus is motivated by love of God and others, and empowered by God’s grace, then it can be developed and lived calmly and with greater sensitivity to the objective reality of things in their proper hierarchy as willed by God who knows everything and sets the ultimate standard of things.
We should try our best to live always in the presence of God that would also bring about the presence of everybody else. That’s because if our presence of God and love for him is real, then we would also have a vivid sense of the presence of the others and an abiding love for them.
It would be good and helpful that in developing this proper sense of order and focus, we bring things first into our prayer so we can see them more clearly under the light of God’s will, and not just under our own interests and purposes. In that way, we can easily establish the priorities proper to each of the things that come our way.
There will be a good sense of purpose and direction, and any unexpected thing or surprise that can come our way can be handled better without getting confused or lost.
Besides, with this good sense of order and focus and a good sense of purpose and direction, we can easily discover and discern other possibilities that are relevant to our plans.
A well-thought-out daily strategy attracts more relevant ideas. The promptings of the Holy Spirit are more easily discerned. We become more discriminating of things, and we would know what to get and give attention to and what to ignore and discard.
In other words, we would become more prudent, our power to judge things and events properly gets sharpened, and our ability to be flexible, adaptive to the demands of the moment as well as creative is facilitated./PN
