It’s been snowing again in Michigan, bringing winter’s unique beauty to the landscape. In an effort to send a picture-text to my grandchildren, I’ve tried again and again to capture a blizzard-in-progress. But the camera, whether it’s my phone or the old fashioned kind, has trouble knowing what to focus on.

One picture will be of a distant tree with blurred snowflakes in the foreground. The next might highlight one snowflake with everything else unclear.

People can have the same problem, not sure what should be the main focus. A husband might zero in on his job, which then blurs his commitment to his family. A wife might make her children the focal point, which isn’t fair to her husband. And for those of us who are Christians, our main focus can easily stray from the Lord and his Word.

But how can we check ourselves against focusing on the wrong things?

The first step is to decide what our main focus should be, just like a camera chooses one small part of a complicated scene to hone in on. My iPhone camera has a focus feature that activates as I touch the part of the picture I want it to focus on. A small blue square pops up in response to my finger, and when I “click” the camera shutter button, that area of the picture comes out in sharp focus.

The problem with photographing snowflakes is that they’re always moving. A camera’s focus-feature gets confused when it can’t successfully zero in on one item.

That’s true for us, too. When everything in our world keeps changing, we get confused about how to keep the main thing the main thing. It may even be difficult to determine what the main thing ought to be. And that’s why it’s important we choose to focus on those things that never change. As far as I know, it’s a very short list: (1) God, and (2) his Word. If I let my focus wander from those, life can get blurry in a hurry.

We can know beyond all doubt that God is who he says he is and will do what he says he’ll do. He won’t waver, change, or back away from any of his promises. And the intense love he has for us will never lessen.

Back in the 1960’s when Dad took Kodachrome pictures on a manual-focus camera, he’d line up his subjects in an effort to get a family photo but would have trouble finding someone to focus on who wasn’t wiggling. So he’d say, “Someone hold up five fingers and keep them still!” He’d turn his lens until the fingers were perfectly focused and then click the shutter. Because the faces were gathered around the hand, the whole group was perfectly in focus.

It works the same way when we close in tight to the Lord. Finding the right focus is easy after that.

“The Lord’s plans stand firm forever; his intentions can never be shaken.” (Psalm 33:11)