Jonathan Thomas’ book “Intentional Interruptions” focuses on those smaller interruptions of day to day life and how God can use them. However, this got me thinking of the ways in which God can use the bigger events in life to force us to hit pause on our own plans and agendas and pay attention to him.
One big and obvious recent example of such an interruption was of course the pandemic. For many of us, it forced us to slow down or even stop our routines. Suddenly we were not consumed with the routine of the rush hour as we learnt to work from home. We weren’t able to socialise in the same ways. Churches were not able to meet in person and we learnt to use things like Zoom, Facebook and YouTube. For many, it felt like an enforced sabbatical. This seems to have been a time of unlearning old ways and patterns and learning new ones. Quite a few people used the lockdowns to reflect on the direction of their life and their priorities.
Similarly, ill health can act as an interruption whether that’s through physical sickness or mental illness such as depression. Back in November 2019, it seemed that the direction of things for my life was settled. I was busy as the pastor of what to all intents and purposes seemed to be a thriving church. We had a week pack jammed with ministries, 4 weekend congregations and one in an embryonic stage, we were looking to church plant and were helping others with revitalisation. Then bang, it all came crashing down in a flood of tears and I found myself benched on the sofa. In many respects that month became a kind of ground zero for me as I returned to the basics of simple prayer, reflecting on the Psalms and learning to cling to Christ. This also probably did the initial shaking up of things and it is possible that without the events of late 2019, we would have bunkered down and got our way through the pandemic, returning to normal as soon as possible.
We may experience redundancy as an interruption. Whilst losing your job is not something to actively desire and can be painful, it’s not something to waste. That triple whammy of ill health, the pandemic and redundancy certainly was a strong and irresistible interruption for us. I also remember how my dad described back in the 1990s his prayer that God would keep him safe in his job only for God to ask him “Do you trust me to keep you safe out of your job.” Redundancy led dad and mum to a decade living in China and then a further decade of regularly visits seeing fruitful ministry. Dad says that had he continued in his work then those Gospel opportunities may well not have been open to him even 10 years or so later.
Suffering and persecution can act as a big interruption. We’ve seen this as we’ve been blessed by the lives of people forced to flee their home countries as asylum seekers. This can happen on a significant corporate scale too. Think of how God interrupted the Jerusalem church in Acts to propel the fledgling church into mission. What might God be doing in and through the Ukrainian church today?
Marriage and children will act as God sent interruptions. They can disrupt your plans or force you to put things on hold as new priorities form in your lives for a time. At the same time, the disruption can be through singleness and childlessness if we are caused to think again about the hopes and dreams we had for how our lives would turn out.
Just as I was encouraged by Jonathan’s book to welcome the little everyday interruptions and to see how God is at work in them, I would encourage you to welcome these larger scale interruptions and learn to see and hear God in them too.
Faithroots 