Distractions

Have you ever sat down to your computer planning on doing some work and said “I need to look this up on the internet” and then end up spending two hours looking up crazy cat videos or other videos? It is amazing that some of the things in our lives that are meant to help us, end up distracting us. I know that I can find myself turning on the television for just a few minutes and two hours later I am still watching it and I have eaten half a bag of Fritos.

Sometimes we have good intentions to do something productive and allow ourselves to get distracted with things that are not as important. This happens so often in our lives, we have the best intentions, but we sometimes fall short of what we want to do. This not only happens in the work that we do, but also, we can allow it in our prayer life. We have the best intentions here and maybe plan to spend 20 minutes praying every morning, or we plan to pray the rosary every day, or we are going to really focus on the Mass, but then something distracts us. We begin to pray the rosary and realize that we forgot to change the laundry, so we go and take care of that real quick so we can get back to praying, then the phone rings, then the kids wake up from their naps, and then we end up back on the internet looking at cats riding Roombas.

God understands that we can get distracted in prayer, but we need to do our best to fight through the distractions and refocus, whether it be at Mass or in our private prayer life. When we catch ourselves distracted, just take a breath, refocus and try again, don’t end up going farther into the distraction by focusing on it. Within our parish, there are many different distractions to draw us away from focusing on the Mass or other prayers. With the number of children here, and their activity, or just the people we know and recognize in Mass, there are things that can draw us away from really praying in private or praying with the Mass.

There is no such thing as bad time praying or wasted time with God, it always helps us out in some way. Remember some of the greatest saints of the Church sometimes struggled with prayer or had distractions within their prayer life. St Teresa of Avila once said “If I stopped praying every time I got distracted, I would never finish the Lord’s Prayer!” Distractions will happen in prayer, but the key is to keep spending time with God and see the fruits of that time grow slowly in our hearts.

God bless,
Fr. Ken