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...