Distractions

A quick gist and probably the shortest piece I have ever written.

Very sinister, very unassuming, and looks nothing like it is.

It comes like a thief in the night, like a form of suggestion, a thought, a kind of reassurance that just peer into it once, one time, and that's all.

Distractions will affect you spiritually, even though it won't say out loud that it will. Just one more episode, and another, and another; each "tudum" and the fading letter "N" brings a wave of guilt, but you shake it off because you can. It goes on and on until you forget to read your Bible, meditate, falling asleep like that, each day. It goes on and on until you don't do that group assignment or finish reading on time.

You make the excuse " there's no time; days are rolling by so fast, we need, like, 48 hours in a day". When your day is scrutinized, one discovers Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts and probably things holy spirit didn't send you to do took most of your day. Then you start fighting with all the deluge of information you have gathered from social media. It beclouds your mind so much; you can't even concentrate while reading. There's just this urge to open your phone and scroll, drawing you like a magnet.

Then exams approach, and because you have been distracted the whole semester, you begin to fret. You start to make faith confessions that you never exercised, you go ahead to snap notes, cramming mode activated!!!

You abstain from sin as much as possible so that perhaps God will have mercy on your poor soul. You don't eat; you read with headaches. This time is all about you, you take harmful substances and wallow in beautiful two weeks of harm to your body. No doing your exam in rest, rest is for the fool!

Distractions will lead you away from the things that really matters, it will make you forget you ought to be a Jesus student and not do academics like the heathen do. You kinda forget you are a Christian student and the more far away you are from what is expected of a Christian the more your thoughts and actions will not align with what the Lord will have you do.

Distractions will tell you, you won't be burnt; it's just for a while. Then it immerses you, it swallows your whole being, and that's so unfair because you just wanted a sip, a tip of the iceberg, they say.