One of the five males in my family is steady and focused. We thought he was the unusual one. The rest of my men say he has ASD—Attention Surplus Disorder.

My other guys didn’t answer my questions when I was sitting right beside them, but they talked to me, from the other end of the aisle, in the middle of the symphony.  

They talked—how about those Eagles?—in jumbles—that new movie came out yesterday—that left me—what’s for dinner?—bewildered. 

Chuck locked the keys in the car. With the car running. In front of the airport. Where no one is allowed to park. Ever. When the policeman barked, “Move your car,” Chuck said with a smile, “Wish I could!”

When the kids were younger, I used to say, “They don’t think—these guys of mine.” That’s not true, as I learned when our younger sons rode their toboggan off our only good piece of furniture—the table made by some great-great-great relative (whose precise relation Chuck cannot recall). I roared at my sled-riding sons, “What were you thinking?”

“We were thinking it might be a long time before it snows, and we might get in trouble if we rode the toboggan down our stairs.” Good thinking. Steep as the stairway is in our city rowhouse, they might not have lived long enough for me to kill them for doing something so foolish.  

There was a point to this post. I thought of it when I was setting the table for dinner.  Chuck had come down from his office and our meal was steaming on the table. I reminded Chuck that I had a meeting in thirty minutes. I turned my back for a second to get the salad out of the fridge. Chuck had disappeared. After a search, I found him on the porch. He had brought home a batch of impatiens for our window boxes. As he planted the flowers, he told me to take note of their name. Sometime between checking my rising impatience and watering the cheerful impatiens, I lost the point of this post, but found the perspective I had been missing for a while.   

Ah . . .  here it is. Some of my guys are distracted by, well, anything: the ding of a cell phone, the music coming through a window, the chipmunk on a cactus. I, too, however, am easily distracted. I am distracted by the work I focus on too intently. May God keep us from being distracted from the one thing that is needful (Luke 10:42): worshiping at the feet of Christ.