The Interrupted Christian Life

I'm a straight and narrow kind of person most of the time...or at least I tried to be.

There can be various reasons for that kind of approach or response to life.
One might be fear.  In fact, that's a really common starting place for many folks.
For some people, it is their natural bent.  Soem people have been raised
by fearful parents.  Your early church experience may be molded you along those lines.


Often, what seems good to them strikes them as applicable to everyone. 
Disconcertingly...it isn't, much of the time.

I was born under the triple...no quadruple...whammy of nature, nurture,
natural bent and the sign of Capricorn: the stern taskmaster of the heavens.
If ever one was born to be a straight and narrow type with clearly defined beliefs
and lifestyle, that would be me. 
But Heaven, in it's infinite and comic wisdom, has messed with my neatly arrayed
course on several occasions in life.
I could tell you stories...SUCH stories...but that is not where I want to focus today.

I re-embarked on my voyage of discovery of God on the rocky shores of Cape Breton Island
after having ship-wrecked spiritually and otherwise in the aftermath of a disastrous marriage to a preacher's kid.  
Was it any wonder that I was in for a storm-tossed time of things? The clues were all there.

Comfort eventually came in the form of a passage that found its way to me...
"If God has never interrupted your plans, then you have probably not made His acquaintance."

Anyone who knows what I'm talking about here, knows that there is no small measure
of dark humor in this passage. 

Now, if God has repeatedly interrupted your plans, you are in for a really fine experience,
but that may not be readily apparent at first.  With the passing of time you eventually find that you will survive and even thrive as you learn to let go of your carefully contrived
plans for your life.

Sometimes, nothing can prepare you for the unexpected. 
You might experience an accident, illness or the birth of a less-than-perfect child.
It might be the loss of a job or a career change, the loss of a dream you'd worked hard
to achieve.
You feel like you are caught in a snare, your plans have been up-ended,
your life is not turning out as you wanted it to.... 
You feel that you are the butt of somebody's bad joke.  
Something happens and you are suddenly in uncharted waters and all the pat answers
that served you before have no meaning or efficacy.  
It doesn't help that your friends, family, pastor and well-meaning spiritual counselors have
little of real comfort to offer.  It all sounds right, but it feels strangely hollow...or worse. it engenders more pain 

If God has interrupted your life by way of a painful event...and that is not always the case...you can find yourself in a whirlwind of confusion and distress with thoughts tumbling and emotions in runaway mode.  

For the moment, let's not dwell on the details, even though we naturally strive for answers
and ways to make sense of things.  That is the human response, after all. 

The important factor here is that God/Nature has interrupted our plans...
changed the course of our lives.
Like it or not, we will have to deal with it...and it will change us.

The path can seem lonely and long. 
We feel as though we have fallen out of favor with God.
We struggle with thoughts of guilt for past wrongs, remorse of many kinds.

Details...the mind struggling to undertand what is beyond the mind...for now, that is. 
Not very helpful....
The mind will eventually open and widen and it will understand...as a result of these
very experiences. But it will be a process that can't always be hastened.
 
Perhaps one of the best ways to begin to understand is to look in a very simple
and straightforward way at what has happened to you...   

Did you lose a lot of money in the stock market?
Did your 401k go to money heaven without you? 
If so, money is a tool that can be used to get your attention.  
It becomes a teaching tool.  A very potent one, in fact.

Was it loss of health or an accident?
Then your body is the means by which God could capture your attention.
You may have heard the little whispers to slow down, take care of yourself 
or change a habit,  but you were only half-listening...

Maybe an event such as the kids moving back home or elderly parents needing your time
has altered your plans for your golden years.  You feel as though everything you worked
so hard for is being stripped away.
These are the hard interruptions of life.

It gets your attention!   It holds you fast in its grip . 

From our perspective, things are terrible, unfair, unwanted, unbearable. 
Everyone who views our plight would agree.

But what we really suffer from is not being aware of things from Heaven's perspective.

You have heard it said that God's thoughts are not our thoughts and that His ways
are not our ways.    They are high above our thoughts and our ways...
It is so true!  
After some early struggle, it becomes obvious to us that our perspective is not sufficient.
We muddle through with oftentimes trite, pious sounding prescriptions that offer
little real comfort.
We don't know where or how to get better answers. 
Everyone is doing the best they can, but it's not enough! 
We become frustrated, angry, despairing.


The whole point of God getting your attention is so you can begin to 'hear' from God. 
So that God can get a word in edgewise, so to speak.  
In our busyness and noisy lives,  we cannot be still enough to hear. 
We might be missing out on some very important information.

Remembering that we are eternal souls...and that we are in a series of classrooms
in Life School might help. 
God is intent on growing our souls, while we are bent on perpetual recess or choosing
our own lesson plan and studying at our own pace.
As young souls, we may think we know what is best for us, but in reality, that is unlikely.   
So we make childish choices.
Childish choices that will someday cause us harm or keep us from fulfilling our potential.

I remember gym class, where the coach made us run laps.  I thought I was dying,
but the coach knew what we were capable of and he pushed us to finally run that mile. 
Were it up to me, the outcome would have been far different.  
I would not have believed that I could ever run a single mile.
People run marathons, after all.  Maybe I should head back to the track and try for more!

Were it not for these 'interruptions, we would ply a similar course of underachievement.
We would faint and fail and sometimes think we are dying.  
We do not know what we are made of until we have been forced to exert ourselves
in painful ways.   We find that we are made of very good stuff in the end.

I look back on several decades and several significant setbacks and ' interruptions' of my plans.
At the time, I could never have seen how each of them would re-direct and enrich my life.
Even if God had shouted in my ear, I could not have gotten it.  He knows that...

And so Life carries us to the place where we begin to see and to know far beyond
our first capacity.
I never would have dreamed up this script of my life, but for all that has come...
and not come...I am amazed and grateful. 
Our minds are simply too small in the beginning.  Our lives are too small. 
Our goals too immature.
But as we walk the medicine wheel that we call Life, we grow into that which we really are.

More on the medicine wheel in a future post...   

In the end, God is growing a soul, a child, a man, a woman. 
His agenda is not our agenda. 
It is a better one than the one we had in mind
We are fortunate if we invite that interaction with Spirit. 
Even if we cower from it or fail to invite God to take hold of us in this life,
He is faithful to our soul's needs and deeper desires.
The interrupted Christian life might be the best thing that ever happened to you...

Detroit Story      1975

 

One winter I left the island to visit a young friend in Detroit. 
He had recently become a Christian while  staying at my hostel
on Cape Breton. 
I knew he had a tough road ahead of him. 
I wanted to see how he was doing and help him
find a church to attend. 
I was always ambivalent about that sort of thing. 
I hated to see someone like this young man make
a good start in his spiritual life and then get sidelined
in a dead church. 
Time and time again, once a church got hold of a new convert,
they would promptly ‘educate’ the life right out of them. 
Still, most people would need the support of a body of believers. 
It just helped to show them how to negotiate the scene. 

My young friend and I planned to go shopping for a church

to attend on Sunday morning. 

But this was Saturday night and we headed out for a long walk 

to catch up on things.  We walked for miles it seemed.

We eventually found ourselves in the downtown area. 

By that time the sun was going down and it was getting

colder by the minute.

We looked for a diner or coffee shop, but everything

was closing and the downtown was quickly emptying

of people.   It was too late to turn back and too late to go forward. 

Eventually we noticed an open door with a brightly lit interior. 

We ducked in hoping to warm up a bit and rest before the long walk home.  Once inside, we were fascinated by the architectural details. 

It was a stately old building in a crumbling inner city. 

We wandered around admiring the old staircase, the ornate tiles

and the marble wall panels. 

We were in an old Masonic temple from the look of things. 

We headed up the staircase to see what the mezzanine

and the balcony held. 

We had been chattering away happily up to that point, 

but when we got to the top and surveyed the auditorium below,

we quickly lowered our voices. 

Down below us we saw a few elderly black folk carrying Bibles

under their arms. 

Apparently the lodge had been turned into a church and we had intruded on their service. 

We sat down out of sight and tried to be inconspicuous. 

The few people gathered were thinly dispersed around the huge auditorium. 

Perhaps a dozen or so parishioners scattered 2 by 2, mostly older, mostly women. 

They bowed their heads and prayed quietly or spoke in low tones

while they waited for the service to start. 

2 or 3 more people joined them and their prayer service began. 

Not a very impressive crowd.  They prayed silently for a brief time. 

They prayed informally, each tending to their own concerns.  

Their voices, quiet at first, began to be audible to us. 

Their voices gradually became more animated. 

Then one woman stood alone and began to pray in tongues. 

I wondered what my young friend would think. 

We had never talked about anything like that. 

I had little experience of it myself.  

Soon another worshipper stood and prayed in tongues. 

And then another...and another. 

Before long there was an embarrassing cacophony of sounds. 

Then one of the women lifted her voice above the others as she began to sing in tongues.

I had never heard anything like that before. 

It was an eerie tongue and an eerie melody. 

The others began to do the same tongues-singing. 

We had never seen a church service like this.

The sound was confusing as they all sang different

 languages and songs. 

Their voices became louder now, more emphatic. 

I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say to my friend. 

It was so strange...hard on the ears.

 

In the next instant, the most astonishing thing happened. 

All of their voices quite suddenly flowed and fell together 

into the same glorious melody. 

And then in the next moment, those few voices were joined

by hundreds of other voices. ..angelic voices.

The music we heard was indescribably beautiful.  

There is no music on earth that compares.

It lifted us to our feet. We stood frozen, with hair standing on end, transported into an ethereal realm. 

Tears streamed down our faces.  We couldn’t speak. 

Our eyes alone confirmed to each other that we were hearing the same unearthly performance.  

The hall was filled with voices singing in majestic tones.

The sound of the voices rose and fell together for some time. 

We were transfixed, weeping for the beauty and power of it.  

 

And then... just as suddenly as they began...

the voices rose and fell together one last time...

and then they stopped as one. 

The hall throbbed with what can only be described

as Glory. 

A few moments of silence followed. 

Then without fanfare or remark, people quietly gathered

their things, put on their coats and left for home.