Among today's headlines there was one that wasn't an event at all. It was a question: how do you stay friends with God in a distracted world? No crisis attached, no argument to win. Just an honest question that a lot of us are quietly carrying around in our pockets.
Distraction itself is not new. Martha was distracted in her own kitchen, and there wasn't a screen in the house. What's new is the volume — the sheer number of things with a legitimate claim on our attention, plus a thousand more with no claim at all that get it anyway. And attention is the one resource we cannot manufacture more of. You can borrow money. You can hire help. You cannot buy back a mind that has been sliced into forty pieces before breakfast.
The tent outside the camp
There is a small, strange passage in Exodus that I keep going back to. Moses pitched a tent outside the camp and called it the tent of meeting. When he walked out to it, the whole camp stood in their doorways and watched. And then this line: "So the LORD spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, did not depart from the tabernacle" (Exodus 33:11).
Face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. Not as a subject addresses a king from the far end of a throne room. As friends talk — ordinary, back-and-forth, unhurried. God was willing to be spoken to that way. He still is.
Joshua didn't leave
But notice who else is in that verse. Moses finished his conversation and went back to work. Joshua stayed. He was a young man, an assistant, not the one with the staff or the shining face. Nobody stood in a doorway watching him. He simply didn't want to leave the place where God had just been speaking, so he lingered.
I find that enormously encouraging, because it means the deep friendship isn't reserved for the person up front. It goes to whoever stays a little longer. Some of the people I watch grow fastest in our church aren't the ones with the most Bible under their belt or the most years in a pew. They're the ones who linger — after the last song, in the truck in the driveway, at the kitchen table at 5:40 in the morning. The Spirit meets lingerers. He always has.
The friendship was His idea first
Here is what keeps this from becoming one more thing to feel guilty about. Jesus said to a room of ordinary men, "No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you" (John 15:15). He named the relationship. He opened the books. We did not talk Him into it.
So the goal isn't to concentrate hard enough to earn an audience. It's to stop running long enough to notice One who is already present. The Holy Spirit is not a signal we have to strain to pick up on a distant frequency; He is a Person living in you, and He is remarkably patient with a scattered mind. He speaks in the middle of laundry. He brings a verse to mind in the parts department. He nudges you to call somebody, and two days later you find out why.
What undistracted looks like on a Thursday
Practically, it's smaller than most of us expect. Drive to work with the radio off. Leave the phone face-down on the counter through breakfast. Keep a cheap notebook and write down the one sentence you sense the Spirit saying, because unwritten words evaporate. Pray out loud in the barn, in the shop, in the car — out loud helps.
And if you have been doing all of that for a long time and heaven has felt quiet, hear this plainly: friendship with God is not measured by goosebumps. Job's friendship held in silence. Yours does too. The quiet is not a verdict on you.
If you want company in the lingering, our prayer gathering meets this coming Tuesday, September 15, at 11am. There is something clarifying about sitting in a room with other people whose phones are down and whose hearts are open. That's a tent of meeting too.
Moses walked back into the camp with a face that had been near God. Because of Jesus, we don't stand in our doorways watching someone else go in. The curtain is open, the Friend is already speaking, and He is not in a hurry with you.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.