A MAN’S FOCUS

About a month ago, my husband asked me to drop some tool off at his job.  He is a contractor and works outdoors most of the year.  I got the tool and headed over to the house where he was working at the time.  When I arrived, for some reason I just didn’t feel like getting out of the car and so I parked right in front of the house where he could see me.  The front yard was small and he was working about thirty feet or less from where I was.  He seemed intent on his work, but shortly he looked up and looked towards the car.  I thought he had seen me, but immediately his head turned back towards his work.  A few seconds later, he again turned his head towards my car and then began to come down the ladder.  I assumed that he had seen me, but when he reached the bottom of the ladder he walked across the front yard, not fifteen feet from the car, to the other side of the house where his helper was working and he began to do something else.  Finally, in frustration, I dialed his cell number.  I watched as he fumbled around trying to get the phone out of his pocket while still wearing his gloves.  He still had no clue concerning my presence even though I was sitting in the car fifteen feet away from him.  “Hi honey, I’m right here in front of the house.”  “Where?”  He finally looked up and saw the car.

Even though I teased him about not seeing me, it caught my attention and for several days brought about deep wonderment and meditations about how focused he was on his work that he did not even see me just a few short feet away from him.  As he worked, I could see his mind calculating every necessary movement and piece of material to complete the required task.

Later that same week, he and I were sitting down after a hard day of work, enjoying the evening news.  I know that it was a Thursday night because on Thursdays the reporter for sports on our favorite channel always has a short report that he calls ‘Kevin’s 7.”  In it he shows clips of the best and worst moments in sports for the week.  As I watched men hurdling their contorted bodies straight into a crowd in order to grab a basketball away from their opponent or football players leaping over other players and plowing through heavily muscled blockers in order to reach the end zone, I realized what it is that makes men so good at what they do.

Women pride themselves in being multi-taskers.  Some men might do the same.  However, the strength of men is in their ability to focus completely on what they are doing.  In sports, it shows up as a total focus on that ball and whatever it is that they have to do with it.  The basketball player focuses his whole being on getting that ball into the basket.  The baseball pitcher focuses everything that he is on getting that ball over the plate in just the right spot to get a strike.  In work men are able to excel at whatever they do because their whole mind, and as a result their whole body, is in sync with what they are doing.  Women sometimes act as if they are superior to men because they are good at doing many things at once.  Maybe some men feel bad about that.  Doing many things at once is a necessity for a woman because of the kind of life she has, but thank God for a man who can channel all of his energy, thoughts and actions into what he is doing at any given moment and because of that ability can bring great things to pass.