Create your "presence checkpoints"

“And I make it my business only to persevere in His holy presence, wherein I keep myself by a simple attention…which I may call an actual presence of God…” - Brother Lawrence

“Fear is not the mind-killer, context-switching is the mind-killer.” - Elon Musk

I wear a lot of “hats” in life. The obvious priorities of husband, dad, and worker / leader are enough to keep me busy and tired. The not-so-obvious ones take up even more time: 

• Maintaining my health and fitness with nutrition, workouts, daily step count.
• Managing our home, yard, cars, things.
• Organizing all the details of my family’s monthly/weekly finances, a couple LLC’s, savings & investing goals.
• Being aware and engaged with my kids, their friends and hobbies and schoolwork, “training them up”, trying to get them to be kind to each other and keep their rooms clean.
• Reading, writing, general personal improvement with who I want to become and what I want to learn.
• Improving my golf game any way that I can.

These are all important to me. I want to do them all as best as I can. I want to live a full life.

Most of the anxiety I feel is rooted in this sense that if I don’t manage everything in my life with excellence, then it’ll all come crashing down. (I know, I know - I have control issues.)

We weren’t designed to carry the weight of our world.

We are designed to simply walk with God.

He has set up a system for our heart, mind, spirit to go into any environment, to take on any responsibility, and to interact with any person in the light and easy flow of being with Him. This is abiding. This is practicing the presence of God throughout our day.

God helps us with all these “hats”.

God helps us “context switch”.

The Battle for Attention

Context switching is the cognitive process of shifting attention between tasks or events. 

It’s where you go from one thing to another without properly shifting your attention. And it can cause some damage to us over time if we’re not careful. 

Within a couple hours of being awake, you’ve got 40 different “tabs” open in your mind, heart, and actual tasklist.

When it comes to work:

• 23 minutes & 15 seconds – The average time it takes to refocus after being interrupted. (UC - Irvine)
• 40% productivity loss – Frequent task-switching can reduce productivity by up to 40%. (APA)
• 3x more mistakes – Task switching increases error rates compared to focusing on one task at a time. (Journal of Experimental Psych.)
• 30% of workday spent recovering – Employees spend nearly a third of their workday recovering from interruptions. (RescueTime)

This is just in the work context. Think about all the other responsibilities you have in life and you’ll easily see that context switching is costing you a lot mentally, emotionally, physically - and of course, spiritually .

Context switching can take our attention off God and away from His presence. 

And before we know it, we’ve gone another day without awareness, without abiding. Over time, we craft a life of trying to do it all ourselves.

Natural Interruptions

Going from “hat” to “hat” is a natural part of the lived experience. Interruptions are sure to come.

Commuting, notifications on my phone, my kids screaming through the house, all the endless ways I’m interrupted work together to shift my attention. 

Some studies suggest that people spend up to 6 hours a day dealing with interruptions and recovery time. (Basex Research)

Jesus had a lot of interruptions in his day. Yet, he dealt with them all perfectly. 

He walked in step with his closest companion, the Holy Spirit, and interruptions turned into ministry and miracles.

According to the New Testament, he has now given you the Holy Spirit as your closest companion to reshape and empower your internal operating system.

You can now see interruptions as “alarms” for presence.

And you can create physical spots in your everyday routine to come back to presence.

Presence Checkpoints

If I’m not attentive, I’ll context switch into a new place or task at my own speed. Of course, God goes with me but it seems I charge into it without Him, attempting it on my own strength.

I want to take the presence of God with me into every space I walk into. I need help remembering He is with me.

At the height of my young fatherhood and spiritual renovation, I knew I needed a way to take God’s presence into the next space or task I was going into.

So I began creating “presence checkpoints” in my routine.

Presence checkpoints are physical places in my daily routine that I enter into often that I have purposefully turned into locations where I meet with God.

• Making coffee as soon as I wake up - slow breathing and feeling gratitude.
• The Shed in our backyard where I workout - talking with Him as I train.
• The school zone sign - prompting me to pray with my kids for their day.
• The parking lot of my work office - asking God to make me an effective leader and do fruitful work for His kingdom.
• A banner above my office door - as I walk out into the hallway or common area to go into a meeting.
• Our driveway after a workday - asking the Spirit to help me put on my “loving dad hat”.
• The hallway outside our kids’ rooms - after I shut the house down, where I put my hands on their doors and pray for them individually.

These are my everyday locations that have transformed into meeting places with God.

They help me context switch with all of my various “hats” and maintain a state of presence.

I flow into the next place, project, or person with the presence of God.

This is a practice. 

This is something you must consistently and deliberately think and act on.

And it is a discipline that eventually becomes effortless. 

It is Jacob at Bethel, Moses and the bush, the Israelites and the Jordan River, David and his tent, Daniel and his window that faces Jerusalem, Jesus and the garden or mountain, the early Church and their meeting places.

1. If there was a grading scale A+ to F, how would you rate your ability to context switch and keep attention on the Lord with you?
2. Make a list of your various “hats”.
3. Make a list of your 3-5 everyday locations.
4. Write down what you want to pray or meditate on in each location to help you context switch in flow with Him.
5. Consecrate (surrender and commit) those locations to Him.
6. Let me know if this practice helps by replying to this email!

Taylor Jervis

Tyler, Texas

February 28, 2025