What Gets YOUR Attention?

Did you know that you’ve been playing a game your entire life, maybe without even realizing it? Every morning, you wake up with a full pitcher of water. Throughout the day, you pour that water into various cups. By the time you go to sleep, the pitcher is empty. The goal? Pour the water into the right cups!

The pitcher is you. The water? That’s your attention, your mental energy, your focus, your emotional bandwidth. The cups are everything competing for that attention: work, family, friends, social media, Netflix, worry, ambition—and God.

Here’s the catch, and it’s a big one: Water can’t go into two cups at once. When you’re scrolling YouTube, you’re not present with your kids. When anxiety consumes your thoughts, you’re not communing with God. When you’re mentally rehearsing an argument, you’re not investing in your marriage. It’s just psychology. Your attention can only be in one place at a time.

It’s so easy to spend hours doomscrolling news articles about things that we cannot control and honestly don’t affect our daily lives—hours of water poured into cups labeled Outrage and Strangers’ Opinions while the cup marked Family sits bone dry.

Many people spend years emptying themselves without ever honestly checking which cups are full and which are empty. They water the gardens they never meant to plant. They leave parched the very relationships they swore were most important.

Jesus Christ cut right to the heart of this when He said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). We could take that further—where your attention goes, there your heart truly is! Our attention is the revealed preference of our values, the undeniable proof of what we truly care about versus what we claim to care about.

The Apostle Paul didn’t mince words with the Ephesian church: “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15–16).

Circumspectly. It means carefully, deliberately, with your eyes wide open to what you’re actually doing—not a passive victim of whatever captures your attention.

It’s not far-fetched to say that the Internet has been weaponized against our efforts to live intentionally. Social media platforms employ teams of engineers whose entire job is figuring out how to keep us scrolling, clicking, and engaging. Meanwhile, our spouse sits alone, our kids follow our example, and God—well, He gets whatever’s left over, if anything is left at all.

The prophet Isaiah warned about spending “money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy” (Isaiah 55:2). How much of our attention—our mental and emotional “wages”—do we pour into the temporary while ignoring the eternal? Jesus asked, “What profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26).

At the end of each day, we should ask: which cup have we given the most water? Who heard our best words? Who received our best thoughts and attention?

The Psalms show us a better pattern: “My voice You shall hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning I will direct it to You, and I will look up” (Psalm 5:3). That would be a wonderful and profitable place to pour the first bit of water.

Here’s the good news: Our attention refreshes daily! Unlike money (which you can lose), reputation (which can be destroyed), or physical health (which deteriorates), attention renews itself every single morning. The pitcher fills back up, the cups are empty again, and the game starts over.

This is grace built into the structure of time itself. Regardless of how poorly we might have spent our attention yesterday, today is a new opportunity. Which cup will you fill today?

You can learn more about how to choose wisely by registering today to take our free online Bible Study Course or by ordering the print version.