The past three years of my life have been unreal. In some ways good, in some not so good. And the biggest thing I’ve learned is that both good and bad can be distracting from what God wants me to do.

Harrison and I were talking a couple weeks ago about how our life together has been anything but normal. Two weeks from now, on March 6, 2011, it will have been three years since I popped the question. Since then, here’s the craziness that has been our lives.

• We planned a wedding, honeymoon, rehearsal dinner – the whole shebang.
• We started a new church. Not for the faint at heart, to say the least!
• We got pregnant and started a family, complete with 15 weeks of morning sickness, 40 weeks of showers, planning, and buying, and now 4 months of smiling and laughing until my face hurts.
• We bought a foreclosed house under construction, finished building it while being homeless for 4 weeks, dealt with a mortgage company for 5 months, and moved.

Every single one of these events was life-changing, and every single one was a true gift from God. However, as we talked about the most recent in that list, it hit us that we let each of these do something that we’ve since allowed God to deal with us about – each was a distraction.

Most recently was this issue of our house. Every step of the process went completely different than planned. Construction took 3 months longer, which meant we were literally homeless and bumming a room from friends for 4 weeks. Budget went thousands over. Mortgage company threw curve balls and unexpected costs at nearly every turn. In fact, this past week before we closed was literally one of the worst in my life, not knowing what would happen next and the constant fear of “what if?”

Now that we finally are past it, Harrison jokingly asked, “What will we do next?!” My response? “Live. We’re just going to live.”

As I’ve processed that conversation, I am realizing more and more what I meant by that comment. I’ve realized that I let these things distract me. I should have allowed them each to point me to Christ instead of pointing me to self. I should have cut some busy-ness to just rest and beg God to use every second of my life to make a difference.

So going forward, I am not asking God to take away opportunities or big changes. Instead, I am begging him to help me not get distracted by those things. I want to be more focused on being like Jesus. I want to pray more. I want to focus on my marriage more. I want to focus on being an awesome daddy. I want to focus on leading the Church well. I want to write more, plan more, study more. I want to do whatever it takes to focus on allowing God to use my one life to make a difference.

So I challenge you – whoever in the world reads this blog – to join me in my own personal challenge. Let’s embrace the chaos that is life. But let’s do it with focus. Let’s be done with distractions.