how to change your focal length: part 1

Do you know how lenses work? I bet you do if you wear spectacles.

Here's the science bit: the light refracts through the curved glass and changes your perception of the image. For an image to be crisp and clear of course, you have to make sure you're at exactly the right distance from the lens so that the light rays focus to a point where your eyes can process it.

There are lots of different types of focus, I suppose, not just optical. Recently, I've found myself focused on myself... a lot. I've been really short-sighted, worrying about how I'm going to get stuff done, troubled by my diet, my sleep, my memory, my ability to play scales, and what happens when my iPad slips off its stand during a service and accidentally switches my keyboard off in the middle of a worship set.

Yes. That did happen. I think I got away with it.

The point is, it's all been a bit 'me, me, me' and if there's one thing that's certainly true, it's that I'm quite boring and unproductive to think about, and I'd rather it wasn't that way; it gets depressing after a while. Plus, it took me ages to notice.

But. I think I might also have discovered a secret. What if there were a way to change your focal length?

What if you could change the lenses of your life so that the things you were focused on shifted, and the foreground became the background, and the background swam into clarity?

As worshippers, we often talk about 'focusing' on God, allowing him to 'open the eyes of our hearts' and being 'determined' to seek him. Those are good pursuits of course, but I think I've discovered a practical key to making it work - a way to change your focal length, so that it's much less 'me, me, me' and much more 'him, him, him'...

It's praise. I think praise can change your focal length. It brings down walls, it crumbles enemies, it exalts and it encourages, it breaks out of prisons, and it heralds history. It magnifies God - literally shifting the focal length so that he increases, and we decrease. 

There are lots of words for praise in the Bible, and with good reason. So, what I'd like to do is go through a few of them in the next few posts. Meanwhile, here's a challenge that might help persuade you of the power of praise.

Next time you're praying and you've got some devotion time, try simply telling God how good he is. Don't ask him for anything, don't thank him, don't pray for other people - just discipline yourself to spend as long as you can proclaiming who he is. My guess is that it will be difficult at first, and then get a lot easier - but see how you get on!

I'm going to try too. After all, when we lift up our eyes to the mountains... we're not supposed to focus on the foreground. There is so much more to see.

listening to the bee gees

I've been listening to the Bee Gees recently. You know, what with me being ultra-cool and modern and everything.

Actually, I shouldn't mock the Bee Gees. It's occurred to me that they were geniuses, and tellingly, their songs are everywhere, still. The close-harmony modulating chords stretch way beyond 'Jive Talking' and 'Night Fever', as brilliant as those tracks are.

I think because they came to define an era, the late 70s and early 80s almost trapped the Brothers Gibb into a disco-genre all of their own - and in the wake of that era, I grew up believing their music to be over-simple, cheesy and old-fashioned, not realising that the popularity of so many artists rested on it. It took me a long time to realise that the Bee Gees are of course, none of those things.

Before those high-octane decades, these three genial siblings reinvented themselves time and again - from sitting on stools in black and white Australian TV, singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' and writing quivering ballads like 'Massachusetts' or 'Nights on Broadway'... to penning classic hits for Diana Ross, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, they just kept moving, adapting, staying alive, if you will.

At the core of their work though, even in the 90s when they dropped the high voices and started singing 'Too Much Heaven' an octave lower, the same strands are still there, reimagined: Barry smiles and sings through the verse, then Robin and Maurice sing a third above and a third below respectively, and as the carefully coreographed harmonies swoon across the unexpected chords, we find ourselves moved, and moving once again.

Capturing a simple idea and developing it into something uniquely you that's recognisable or memorable, is a great way to write songs. Every single one of The Bee Gees' classics has a memorable hook, a distinctive feel, and a unique style. And they did it time after time.

I'm not sure why I started listening to them again. Anyway, as cheesy and as old-fashioned as it might seem, I quite like the Bee Gees.