Do You Hate Being Inconvenienced? Jesus Didn't: On Welcoming Divinely-Appointed Interruptions

Some thoughts regarding a schizophrenic encounter in Portland, sage wisdom from Oxford, and why interruptions are good for our discipleship.

**painting above is “Christ Healing the Bleeding Woman”, by Simon Jordaens

Three years ago, I embarked on a bit of a personal pilgrimage. I was a second-year seminary student, and one of my assignments for a spiritual formation course was to engage in a one-day silence retreat. It’s exactly what it sounds like: one full day of being committed to saying nothing, and instead opening up my ears to what God might have for me.

My wife Emma was doing some contracted work for an organization in Portland, Oregon. Through connections of hers, I had the chance to tag along and spend most of my “day of silence” at Bridgetown Church (where John Mark Comer was pastoring, at the time). Bridgetown has a dedicated prayer room (it is as cool as it sounds), which seemed like as good a place as any to engage in a full day of listening to God’s voice. I was a little nervous, but mostly excited to engage in 24 hours of this hard-to-practice spiritual practice.

I showed up to the church around 8am and was graciously given a room to set up shop in. No one would interrupt me throughout the day. No one would have need to break my silence. As the assignment on the class syllabus said, “do your best to eliminate all interruptions.” I was well on my way. So I dropped my stuff down, read Psalm 103, and headed out for a walk on a rainy October morning around Northeast Portland. I started walking around praying that the Lord would keep me from distractions.

About five minutes into my prayer walk / full day of silence, I was distracted. A younger gentleman — probably about my age — was waving his arms across the street and trying to get my attention. “Hey!”, he yelled out…“hey dude!” Surely, this guy can’t be talking to me, I thought. The man looked like life had worn him out. He was pushing a shopping cart, didn’t have a coat despite the precipitation, and was generally a little too intent on wanting to talk to me. “Hey man — I gotta talk to you for a second!” So now my mind is running: how do I explain to a guy who is a) likely dealing with a mental illness and b) probably on some sort of narcotic, that I’m taking a day of silence to listen to God’s voice? Truthfully, there was no part of me that wanted to engage in this interruption. I wasn’t interested in a conversation — after all, I was just trying to be a good rule-follower of my class syllabus (eliminate all interruptions)!

But Adrian (the man’s name) was persistent. I sighed. My day of silence was over before it really even got started. I crossed the street to Adrian’s side of the boulevard and ask him, hey man, how are you? His response was a little bit shocking, but it appeared that the Holy Spirit was indeed trying to teach me something through Adrian’s interruption:

He looked at me and said, “you seemed like someone that would maybe pray for me.”

HA! I’m not kidding! Adrian probably repeated that phrase about a dozen more times as he followed me around Sullivan’s Gulch for the next twenty minutes. “Can you just pray for me?” By his estimation, he seemed to be dealing with some sort of demon, and he was convinced that some enemies were following him (my sense is that he was having a schizophrenic episode) — but that’s a bit besides the point. He wanted prayer. And he was an interruption on a day where I was not supposed to have any.

That’s one overly-detailed story from my life, but you have pericopes of interruption that make up your days, too. Perhaps your child interrupted your sleep last night because they were afraid. Perhaps your colleague interrupted your work flow yesterday because they needed help. Perhaps a moving truck interrupted the errand you were on last week because, well, they were trying to move. Interruptions make up our lives, whether we like it or not — but how do we deal with them as disciples of Jesus?

I hate being interrupted. Most of the time, my intentions are not as noble as that little instance in Portland. Most of the time, I’m trying to manifest my own agenda. Most of the time, I’m trying to focus on something I have deemed important. I try to avoid interruptions and inconveniences like the plague, and I suppose there are scientific reasons for this: the Wall Street Journal reports that it takes 25 minutes to refocus on the task at hand after one has been interrupted.

Perhaps you have the same disposition. We are (as my wife sometimes likes to tell me) curmudgeons, whenever and wherever we are interrupted. C.S. Lewis was also a bit of a (self-proclaimed) curmudgeon — but he had Godly wisdom to share as it relates to the anguish of interruption. This is from a letter he once wrote to a friend in Oxford:

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own”, or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life — the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination.”

In short, what Lewis suggests is that a “life without interruption” (convenient as it may sound to us) is nothing more than “a phantom of our own imagination.” It is a farce. An interruption-less life is simply not real — and what Lewis suggests is that interruptions are, in fact, acts that God Himself sends to us.

Why can we not see interruptions this way? Why do we not see an inconvenience as an act of providence? My sense is that it is because we are obsessed with the utopia of our mind’s eye: things like “better balance”, “my peace”, and “I have to cross this off my list”. We elevate these things to the status of utmost importance, such that they become the operative framework of providence in our lives. God’s “sending [interruptions] day by day” (as Lewis says) is no longer our understanding of providence; instead, the myth of life the way we want it (“the phantoms of our own imaginations”) becomes our functional theology of providence.

For the most part, we are disciples that do not see interruption and inconvenience as adventures worth going on. But as the British philosopher G.K. Chesterton famously said, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” If you are like me, you often fail to harness this wisdom — the wisdom of “interruption as adventure” — as one of Jesus’ disciples.

A cursory reading of any of the gospels will weed out any “righteous avoidance” of interruption that we insist on maintaining. Jesus did not see interruptions as nuisances; he saw them as his Father’s business. Mark’s gospel, in particular, is one long narrative of Jesus being interrupted wherever he goes. In Mark 5, Jesus is approached by a religious official (Jairus) whose daughter is at the point of death. Jesus sets out to heal her. And yet — in the midst of his journey to Jairus’ house, with great crowds following him to see another miracle performed — a bleeding woman interrupts his march. She has had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and is convinced that just grabbing hold of the Christ’s garment might heal her.

She is correct — her blood flow dries up, immediately. And I suppose, that could have been the entire miracle. The story could have ended there. But Jesus stops (even though time is of the essence; Jairus’ daughter is still dying) — because apparently, this was an interruption worth engaging. If anyone had a righteous (and medical) reason to avoid this interruption, it was Jesus. But he instead indulges the interruption to remind this woman that her faith has made her well. A worthy interruption, indeed.

Or consider Matthew’s gospel, in chapter 14. Jesus’ friend and cousin (John the Baptist) has just been beheaded by the local authorities. Jesus is understandably grieving. He is in need of some time alone to mourn: “when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself…” (14:13). Not exactly an ideal time to be interrupted, but he is interrupted nonetheless. A crowd is hungry, and Jesus has compassion (he then goes on to perform one of his greatest miracles, the feeding of the 5,000).

He then tries a second time to avoid interruption: “And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone…” (14:23). Yet interruption has its way, yet again: the disciples are stranded out at sea in the midst of a storm. Jesus goes toward the interruption, rather than away from it. He willingly moves toward an inconvenience, rather than insisting on his solitude.

For my part, the conclusion here is straightforward: for those who want to be counted as Jesus’ disciples, they must be willing to engage in divinely-appointed interruptions, of all shapes and sizes. To do so is to follow in the way of Jesus, who seemed to have a knack for any interruption thrown his way. The inconveniences of his life were, as a matter of fact, providentially convenient.

And truth be told, we are so often caught up in “bad interruptions”: our devices, our newsfeeds, our lists, our way. But what that day in Portland taught me was what Jesus profoundly lived out with each human interaction: when we remove bad interruptions from our lives (our idols), we can then open ourselves up to good interruptions in our lives (God’s people, like Adrian).

May we learn “the Jesus way” of inconvenience and interruption when we are sitting in traffic on our way home from the office today.

Keep going.