Focus

You get what you focus on. Let me explain.

When was the last time you bought a new car? Or even a used car? Let's just say that you bought a new car two months ago, and it's a Honda Accord (or insert your favorite make and model here). Driving home from the dealership, you're almost guaranteed to notice that all of a sudden there are dozens upon dozens of Honda Accords on the road! Many more than you've ever seen before! How is this possible? Because, as Wayne Dyer puts it, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Again, you get what you focus on. I like to mountain bike, and although I don't do it as often as I'd like, there is a truth to it I'd like to share. One that I've learned from sad experience.

When you're cruising down a hill at 15 or 20 mph on a trail that's maybe 18 inches wide, there's little room for error, especially if the sides of the trail do not contain passable terrain... like a stream or a cliff or a ditch or rocks. In this scenario, your bike will magically go wherever you look. If you look at the trail and your "line" (read: where you want the bike to go), your bike will stay on the trail and you'll have an amazingly fun descent. If you allow your focus to shift to the stream or the rocks or the ditch, guess where your bike is going to go... You guessed it. Right into the ditch, or the stream, or crashing into the rocks. I've bent wheels and flattened tires proving this theory to be true.

The same is true for your life. What are you focusing on? If you focus on the negative in your situation -- what you don't have, who doesn't love you, the way so-and-so was mean to you at that party, the fact that you weren't invited to that meeting or that activity -- then you will attract more of that lack into your life. You will continue to not have enough of what you don't have enough of, you will continue to not be loved or included. If, on the other hand, you focus on what you DO have, and act as if you have what it is you don't yet have, you will attract into your life more of the abundance, and less of the scarcity.

This, I believe, is why we pay tithing and offerings, and why we're counselled to pay that first and be generous. By so doing, we're attracting more abundance because we're not focusing on what we don't have, but rather our focus is on giving as if we already had, and having faith that God will make up the difference. This is why you hear story after story of how someone didn't have enough money to pay their tithing and all their bills, but they faithfully paid their tithing and somehow the money was there to pay the bills too, and often with a little left over. If you want to attract abundance into your life, give away what you have (i.e. pay tithing and fast offerings, donate to the missionary fund and other charities as well) and you'll always have enough, and I dare say, you'll begin to attract more than enough abundance into your life.

I could go on, but I'll save some for another post. :)