Interruptions Have Purpose by Susan Barclay

 "God shakes us so that the things that can't be shaken will remain." ~Linda Bevere

When heaven touches earth, nothing stays the same.

I don't know about you, but I'm happiest when things are running along evenly, hakuna matata. No worries, no problems. Problems? Who needs 'em?

The thing is though, as long as the sailing is smooth, we tend to take life, and God, for granted. We can keep on the path without seeking God's Word to light it, we can fail to praise God for the blessings we enjoy, we can skip prayer because, hey, everything's going our way! 

But God loves us too much to let us continue along the merry road of ease. He wants us to grow, He wants us to know Him, He wants us to turn to Him, He wants us to become more like His Son (who, for the record, experienced greater suffering than we will ever know), and He wants us to develop compassion for others so we can come alongside them with empathy and understanding. And so He gives us divine interruptions to accomplish His purposes.

The Bible offers us example after example of those who experienced divine interruptions. There's the example of Job, a godly man who didn't lack closeness with God, but who still had his beautiful life disrupted by many sorrows. Unknown to him, his story would be an encouragement to many through the centuries, a reminder that we have an enemy who attacks us because we belong to God, that we need to stand firm in our faith and our knowledge of God's character, that sometimes there are greater purposes in our trials than what we can see on the surface. From him we learn our rightful position under God: He is greater, His thoughts and ways are not ours, we are completely dependent on Him for everything. We also see that "The Lord blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the former part" (Job 42:12a). In very tangible ways, God repays him "for the years the locusts have eaten" (Joel 2:25a). At the end, Job is also a better man. His faith is proven and he is even more humble than when he began.

There's the example of Jonah, the prophet who ran away when God sent him to preach judgement to the Ninevites. Jonah didn't want to go because he knew that God was a God of mercy and would forgive the enemies of Jonah's people, the Jews, if they repented of their evil ways. But God thwarted Jonah's escape by sending a huge storm on the sea, then planting him in the belly of a whale before having him spit up on the shore. Talk about a divine interruption! Jonah went to Nineveh reluctantly, did the job God sent him to do, and was filled with anger and bitterness when God acted exactly as he'd expected in response to Nineveh's contrition. We don't know how Jonah responded to God's rebuke at the end of Jonah chapter 4, but I like to think that like Job, Jonah was humbled by the truth of God's Word to him: people made in God's image and whom He loves are worth more than the lives of plants that have no souls. I like to think that Jonah went forward with greater care and compassion for fellow human beings and that wherever God sent him thereafter, he went willingly, eager to see what God would do.

There's the example of Saul, a most excellent Jew, who thought he was doing the right thing - God's work - in persecuting and killing Christians. He thought he was doing the right thing, that is, until a divine interruption on the road to Damascus, where he was struck blind and had a powerful encounter with the risen Christ. Jesus sends him into Damascus to meet Ananais who restores his sight and where he is filled with the Holy Spirit. Without this supernatural intrusion in his life, Saul would have gone on killing believers; instead he became Paul, God's "chosen instrument to proclaim [the name of Christ] to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel" (Acts 9:15b) and gave us many of the books of our New Testament. He suffered much for the cause of Christ but there is no turning back for one who has had his or her life so dramatically transformed by the gospel.

I've had my own experience of what I would call divine interruptions in the last few years. I've shared them before but I'll share them again, briefly, for new readers or those who need reminding. Both of my children have left the path of Life to follow the world and its pleasures; both of them have boomeranged in and out of our home at one time or another; my mom has had several health issues and been staying with me and my husband for well over a year now. At the moment both my daughter and my mom are with us and that's a dynamic that doesn't always play nicely in the sandbox.

Is there anything more important to us than the people God put closest to us to love? Anything more likely to press us into Him through prayer? My husband and I are certainly more in prayer and the Word than we have ever been. And God has been growing us as we remain firm on our foundation of faith, providing others on similar journeys to walk alongside us. We rejoice in what God is going to do and are confident that He is working behind the scenes even as He was working in Job's life, in Jonah's, and in Paul's. We will not be moved by what we see, but remain fixed on His promises, sure of His character and goodness.

Honestly, I hope that whatever God has for us in these occurrences, we learn from them what we need to, are pruned in the ways we need pruning, keep those things that need keeping, and get rid of those things that are holding us back. May we "[r]un in such a way as to get the prize" (1 Corinthians 9:24b).

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For more about Susan Barclay and her writing, please visit www.susan-barclay.blogspot.com