40&7 Devotional: A Guide To Peace During A Custody BattleSample

Determine the Distraction

One day I saw a quote on Facebook that illustrated how valuable our time is:

“You have $86,400 in your account and someone steals $10 from you. Would you be upset and throw all of the remaining $86,390 away in hopes of getting back at the person who took your $10? Or move on and continue living? Right, move on and live. See, we have 86,400 seconds in every day, so don’t let someone’s negative 10 seconds ruin the rest of the 86,390. Don’t sweat the small stuff; life is bigger than that.” - Author, Unknown

I thought this post was truly profound, and it definitely hit home for me. During my custody battle I spent a lot of time worrying and contemplating what I could do about all the stuff going on. I spent a great deal of time responding to e-mails and being consumed by the accuracy of my responses to the accusations against me, since I didn’t want anyone to twist my words. I later found out that I had no control over that anyway. I had wasted lots of time and energy, and I couldn’t get any of it back.

Have you ever stopped and paid attention to when the distractions in your life happen? The timing is no accident. The enemy strategically designs these things to occur when they do so that we will become distracted from what we should be focused on for that day, that hour, that moment. We have to learn to see our situations with God-vision. When we see things through our own perspective, it’s like looking through glasses caked with dirt. We can’t see what we’re trying to look at.

How do we recognize the distractions and see our circumstances with God-vision? Well, we need to know two important things in order to do this.

First, the devil does not have to plan how he is going to destroy our purpose or strain our relationships years down the line. He only needs to focus on making us give in to his day-by-day attempts at distracting us. Second, since the enemy can only speculate about what will happen and only use evidence because he can’t create reality, he has to make sure that his plans are timed.

The devil knows that if he can steal our time, then he can steal our purpose, our children’s purpose, and our spouse’s purpose.

Think about it!

How has the devil been stealing your time? How can you better position yourself to hear from God to avoid these pitfalls? Write these questions and answers down in your 40&7 Prayer and Scripture Journal to look back at them later on as a reminder of what God has done.