Pay Attention
One
I wasn’t really paying attention
There was a really dumb movie in the nineties, called (fittingly enough), “Dumb and Dumber.” Maybe you saw it. Anyway, a classic quote from that movie comes when one of the main characters is asked why his wife left him. He answers, “She gave me some nonsense about me never listening to her. I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention.” It’s a funny line, because even in dismissing his wife’s criticism, he’s inadvertently admitting that she was totally right about him. But when you step back, it’s actually not so funny, because it reveals a terrible truth, which is that not being able to give someone your full attention destroys relationships. It will destroy the relationship between spouses. It will destroy the relationship between parents and their children. It will destroy the relationship between the soul and God.
Two
Why waste your time on somebody who won’t even pay attention?
The opposite of paying attention to somebody is to ignore them. “Ignore” just comes from the Greek for “not know”, so when we ignore someone, or refuse to attend to them, we don’t even know what they’re doing, what they’re saying, what they’re feeling. And as the old saying goes, what we don’t know can’t hurt us, but what we choose not to know can’t affect us in any other meaningful way either.
You can’t love someone you ignore. You can’t learn from someone you ignore. You can’t sympathize with someone you ignore. You can’t be inspired by someone you ignore. So why would anybody bother investing time in you, when they know that investment is just going to bounce right off of you?
Why would your kids, or your spouse, or God Himself, bother trying to share things with you, when they know you aren’t going to listen because you’ve lost the ability to pay attention?
Three
The Insult of Not Paying Attention
Not only is it a waste of energy trying to relate to someone who is always distracted. It’s worse than that. Being habitually distracted, being unable to pay attention to someone who is trying to relate to you, is a major insult. As the famous playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.”
Indifference, of course, just means that you have no interest in thinking about or feeling about that person. That you refuse to give them your attention. And that’s the ultimate insult, because when you don’t pay attention to someone, it means you think you’ve exhausted what’s interesting about them. That you’re done with them.
At least when you get angry at someone, or even actively hate them, you’re admitting that they are worth thinking about and feeling strongly about. But when you ignore them or can’t focus on them, you’re treating them like a movie you’ve already watched, or a joke you’ve already heard.
When someone is before you, asking for your attention, and you deny it to them, you are saying, “I am less interested in you than in this other thing. You have nothing in you that can hold me, that I feel is worth my thought or my feeling.” That’s a violation. It’s a denial of the truth that the other person is a profoundly unique, infinitely valuable, image of God.
And the most terrible thing of all is that we so often manifest this indifference, this non-attention, to the people who we are called to attend to the most closely; the people we should be most interested in and feel the most strongly about. We’re inhumanly indifferent to the very people we’re called to love.
Four
The People To Whom We Refuse Our Attention
We’ve all seen kids trying to tell their parents something, tell them a story about their day, maybe something they’re really excited about, or something they’re really upset about. We’ve all seen kids try to talk to their parents, and while they are talking, the parents take their phones out of their pockets to look at something. It’s one of the most tragic sights of contemporary life. A parent telling their own child, “You are not interesting. You are not special enough to hold my attention. You trying to share your soul is just not doing it for me.”
It’s a terrible thing to turn away from your own child because something else feels more interesting. And it sends a devastating message. And the truth is, we all do it. We do it to our kids. We do it to our spouses. And we do it to God. We look at our phones when they’re trying to communicate, not because we’re expecting an urgent life-or-death text, but just because we can’t stay concentrated on the other person when the phone offers a new distraction.
We have to stop. Because as we’ve seen, an inability to focus on those we’re supposed to love will eventually destroy the relationship.
Five
Resolution
We have to learn how to attend, for sustained periods of time, to the people in our lives who matter most. Even though we are all in different stages of our spiritual journey, we all suffer from distraction, and we all need to strengthen our ability to give God and others our full attention.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “When you pray, go to your room and shut the door.” Probably the best application of that today is, “When you pray, leave your phone in a different room.”
Spend your time with God trying to focus on Him without interruption. And while you’re talking to Him, ask for the grace of being able to attend fully to the other people He has put in your life.