Make Room for Interruptions
When I was a kid, I never liked fall. It meant that summer was over and school was back. It meant that my days would be spent sitting in a chair and nights would be spent doing the odd numbered math problems. It got colder quicker and got dark faster. The only good thing about fall was the Sunday that occurred once a year ... "Fall Back” Sunday, the Luke Skywalker to the evil Darth Vader … "Spring Forward.” The funny thing is that I would treat it like it was some sort of amazing amount of time, like I would suddenly gain 6 hours or that in the spring I would lose half a day of my life when I had to wind my watch forward (Anyone born after 2000 has no idea what it means to wind a watch.). Most of the time, I would stay up and burn that free hour of sleep, but I never seemed to go to bed an hour earlier in the spring. Of course, no matter which date it was, crazy things would happen at church the next day. People showed up late or early, because they forgot to change their clocks or set their alarms properly.
Funny how something that only happens twice a year and is about the same amount of time as watching to midway through the 2nd
quarter of a football game can seem like such a big problem. It probably stems from the idea that we like to have everything planned out. Whether we are losing time or gaining time, it is something that does not fit into the blueprints of our lives.
It can be easy for us to fall into that same "rut” in our relationship with God. We carve out a certain time each week for Him, maybe on Sunday or Thursday, or maybe an hour or two here or there. We box that time out, and while we may hold it strong against other opportunities, we can show the same kind of rigidity toward God interrupting at other times. If we look throughout the Bible, God never seems to present Himself at “regular times.” Moses did not have a scheduled appointment with a burning bush. Paul did not plan to bump into Jesus on a road. David didn’t think when he got called in from the fields that some old guy would pour oil on his head and say, “Guess what, you are the new king.”
Those are just some of the many examples where God interrupts the "normal” timing of the lives of people to set them on the path for which they were created. Are we prepared to accept that God still works that way? As followers of Christ, we need to understand that these chances are ones we must jump at, even if it interrupts our normal schedule. 'Cause, guess what? The real “normal” schedule is the one that God has laid out, and the stuff we do can serve as the interruptions.
As an old guy, I plan on not wasting my "Fall back” hour in a couple of weeks by sleeping an extra hour … oh wait! I have a 2-year-old …. never mind. As a believer, I am hoping God will have some “interruption” encounters in my life. Hopefully you desire that as well.
