SACRED INTERRUPTIONS

“Now when Jesus had come into Peter’s house, He saw his wife’s mother lying sick with a fever. So He touched her hand, and the fever left her. And she arose and served them.”  (Matthew 8:14-15)

We are not alone. I firmly believe it, partly because I have experienced God’s presence in my life directly as well as through my encounters with others. I’m an extrovert and I’ve always loved people. I truly enjoy meeting people and getting to know them. For the last several years of my life, I have been a full-time singer/songwriter. It seems like I spend a lot of my time coming and going. As I read the stories of Jesus, I notice that He interacted with lots of folks in His comings and goings. People interrupted Him with requests, needs, and questions. He seemed to have the gift of perspective, recognizing priority and importance even in the interruption. He made time to deal with whatever or whoever He bumped into along His journey. Certainly His destination was important, but given His ability to stop and to give, the journey may have been just as significant as where He was headed. 

-- Celia Whitler in “On the Way to Somewhere: Stories and Songs for the Journey”

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ATTENTIVENESS TO GOD

“Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.”  (Acts 3: 19 NKJV)

Worship is the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.  Worship is the time and place that we assign for deliberate attentiveness to God -- not because He's confined to time and place but because our self-importance is so insidiously relentless that if we don't deliberately interrupt ourselves regularly, we have no chance of attending to Him at all at other times and in other places.

-- Eugene Peterson in “Leap Over a Wall”


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GOD'S GRACE INTERRUPTS

God's love has a piercing quality, a persevering element, an assertive and searching aspect.  God yearns for us, woos us, reaches for us.  God's grace has the generative power to pardon, transform, redeem, and perfect, and it pushes and pursues.  God's love is not something sitting on a shelf that we reach for, but a truth at the heart of life that reaches for us.  God's grace interrupts with a compelling, propelling, motivating, and mobilizing quality.  It has the power, if we let it, to break open our hearts, get inside of us, change us, and then work its way through us to others.

-- Robert Schnase in Five Practices of Fruitful Living


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