Why "Just Focus" Was Always Terrible Spiritual Advice

For most of my life, I assumed I was uniquely bad at being still with God.

Not regular-bad. Not the ordinary distraction everyone deals with. I mean something extra seemed wrong with me. I'd sit down to pray, and within a minute or two my mind was already gone—running the grocery list, replaying a conversation from Tuesday, following a bird that moved outside the window. I'd drag my attention back, and it would wander off again before I finished the sentence.

Everyone else seemed to manage just fine. They talked about quiet mornings with God, thirty unhurried minutes of silence, a stillness I couldn't hold for ninety seconds. So I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I blamed myself. I figured I just needed more discipline, more desire, more effort. I needed to want it badly enough.

I tried harder for about two decades. It didn't work.

The advice I kept getting

If you've struggled with attention—whether you've been diagnosed with ADHD or just live with a mind that won't sit still—you've probably collected the same advice I did. Just focus. Set aside more time. Try harder. Be more disciplined. Want it more.

Every bit of that advice shares one quiet assumption: that focus is a faucet you simply turn on. That the only thing standing between you and a rich, attentive prayer life is the decision to concentrate. Turn the handle and the water comes.

But that's not how an attention-challenged brain works. The problem was never that I didn't want to focus. I wanted it desperately. The problem is that wanting to focus and being able to direct and hold that focus on command are two completely different things. You can want it with your whole heart and still watch your mind slide off the moment like water off glass.

So when someone tells a person like me to "just focus," they might as well be telling someone to "just see better" in a dark room. The wanting was never missing. The wiring works differently.

The disciplines weren't built with us in mind

Here's the part that took me far too long to figure out.

The classic spiritual practices—silence, solitude, contemplative prayer, meditative reading—are good. They've shaped faithful people for centuries, and I'm not interested in throwing them out. But almost every one of them, as it's usually taught, quietly assumes you arrive with an attention you can aim and hold. Sit in silence. Empty your mind. Rest quietly in His presence for half an hour.

For a lot of us, that instruction lands like an impossible test. You sit down in the silence you were told to seek, and the silence isn't empty at all. It's crowded. The practice that was supposed to settle you turns into a stopwatch measuring how badly you're failing. You don't come away feeling closer to God. You come away feeling like a failure who's now also bad at God.

And so you quit. I quit, more times than I can count. Start, struggle, quit, feel guilty, start again, quit again. For years I read that cycle as proof that something was fundamentally broken in me—broken in a way that even grace couldn't seem to reach.

I no longer believe that. And if you've lived this, I don't think it's true of you either.

It's a mismatch, not a verdict

Here's the reframe that changed everything for me, and it's simple: the dryness you feel isn't a verdict on your faith. It's a mismatch between an ancient tool and a particular kind of mind.

A practice built on the assumption of steady, self-directed attention is naturally going to frustrate a mind whose attention is neither steady nor easily self-directed. That's not a spiritual failure. That's a fit problem. And a fit problem is something you can actually do something about—which is very different from a character flaw you just have to feel bad about forever.

Sit with that distinction for a second, because it matters. If your struggle to connect with God is a sign that you don't love Him enough or aren't trying hard enough, then the only path forward is shame and more effort—the exact two things that have already failed you. But if it's a mismatch between how these practices are usually taught and how your brain actually works, then the path forward isn't more willpower. It's a different approach.

I find that genuinely freeing. For most of my life, my distractibility felt like evidence against me in some cosmic court. It took years to understand that the wandering mind isn't proof I'm spiritually defective. It's just how some of us are made—and being made this way is not the same as being made wrong.

Where this goes

I'm not going to pretend there's a tidy three-step fix I can hand you at the bottom of a blog post. There isn't, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What I will tell you is that these practices can be adapted. The form most of us were handed—long, silent, still, solitary—is just one delivery system for the thing that actually matters, which is connection with God. Change the delivery system, and the connection doesn't disappear. In fact, for minds like ours, I've come to think the right adaptations don't just make the practices survivable. They start doing something to us, something good, in the very place we thought we were most broken.

But that's a longer conversation than five minutes allows, and it's one I'm working through in more depth right now.

For today, I just want to leave you with the part that took me twenty years to believe: if you've felt uniquely bad at being still with God, you are not uniquely broken. You're working with a mind that the standard instructions simply weren't written for. That's not the end of your spiritual life. It might just be the beginning of a more honest one.

I'd love to hear from you. If any of this sounds like your experience—the wandering mind, the guilt, the quitting and starting over—tell me about it in the comments. What have you tried? What's actually helped, and what made it worse? I read every response, and I think there are more of us out here than anyone admits.

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