It was a beautiful new year morning on the North Shore. I got to the beach early, hoping to start this new year at sunrise with the waves. I had my longboard ready and paddled out from Pua’ena Point into the break. It was a beautiful day of smooth waves, though nothing huge. I made my way out into the waters with only a handful of other surfers around me, and started looking for the next wave.

               I caught a few early, had some short rides, and then went back out into the lineup again. I had only been surfing a couple months at that point, so I was amped up and focused on my board above basically everything else. Still, as I kept catching waves, and things started to feel more relaxed, something unexpected happened. I remembered I had hands. That may sound like a foolish revelation, but it was a true revelation to me. I caught a line on the wave, saw the path I wanted to go, tore my eyes from the front of my board, popped-up and suddenly was aware that I had hands. Moving those hands (and the connected arms) helped me balance and turn more easily.

               Maybe you are laughing at me right now, or shaking your head like I am the dumbest person in the world, but this was a startling realization, and instantly my ride was better. I could maneuver – not well, but infinitely better than the absolute zero maneuverability I had before that. Maybe you have never surfed, but it’s likely you have experienced a similar widening of perspective in other areas of your life. Maybe in a tense moment you suddenly realized the broader context of an argument, or you recognized a outside influence that was invisible to you before because you had been hyper focused on the problem ahead of you.

               In stressful situations we can get tunnel-vision and exclude all other surrounding information. While this can be helpful to the particular task at hand, it can also be a huge detriment to expanding skill. The hyper focus on a single hand pattern on the guitar is to the detriment of the broader context of the neck and developing fluency with the instrument – or, in this case, my hyper focus on the nose of my board and desire to stand to the exclusion of everything else meant I could stand but little else. Without the wider context of the waves, and the whole of my body, my mind was starved for all the information it required to act and react appropriately to the movements of the water and the shifting of my weight and balance on the board. Simply put, tunnel vision made it so I could stand, but I wasn’t really surfing until my vision widened. I had to rediscover my hands.

               As Christians don’t we often get tunnel-vision that blinds us to important surrounding concerns and stymies our growth? It could be a particularly gripping sin that you are so intent on overcoming, that you miss surrounding causes and contributing factors – and more importantly you forget that Christ has paid for all of your sin already. He has covered it entirely, and it has no power. You are free indeed.

It might be a diligent focus on only one area of Biblical study, to the exclusion of all others. Rediscovering your hands may be expanding your study of eschatology, for instance, to a study of Christology – not just when He is coming back, but expanding to who He truly is today and forever. Your tunnel vision might even be a positive desire for something good and of the Lord, like a spouse or Godly relationship, but in such a manner that it chokes out the rest of the world around you. You see nothing else. Rediscovering your hands may be the joy of the community that God has around you today, to prepare you for the community He wants you to bless and be blessed by tomorrow.

               Whatever the case may be for you, in Surfing and in the Christian life, there are times when you need to be really focused on one thing, and there are times when you need to expand out your perception so you can see more than you did before. When you do, you both recognize and become more through God’s grace than you were before you saw. Praise be to the One who brings sight to the blind and helps us rediscover our hands and all the grace He has already shown us that we may be empowered to further glorify Him as long as it is called today.