Eyes Forward

When I was a child I had a tendency to daydream. The teachers in my classes would often catch me staring out the window, my thoughts far away from what was going on in the front of the class. There were so many times I had no clue what was going on because I was lost in thought. One teacher would periodically call out, "Terri, eyes forward!" It would disrupt whatever pleasant thoughts were going on in my head at the moment and pull me back into what was happening in the room.

As an adult, I often find myself getting distracted or lost in my own thoughts and being pulled away from the task at hand. The distractions are not bad activities, but they do keep me from staying focused.

Each year, I pray about a specific topic or word to focus on. This year as I've reflected about things, the words, "eyes forward." keep popping up in different things I read, conversations I have or messages I hear. It's happened enough that I'm starting to realize that they are words that I need to pay attention to each day.

My theme for 2021 is "eyes forward."  You can call it by other things - focus, concentrate, zero in, centered, but no matter what my desire is to remind myself to stay in the moment, and keep my eyes forward so I don't miss the task I've been called to do.