“If you don’t like disruptions, stay away from God”

Sometimes God throws unwelcome surprises at us.

We can be happily minding our own business, doing the best we know to do, diligently fulfilling our roles—good roles like parenting and spousing (is that a word?), ministry, chores around the house and yard, maintaining friendships—when BAM! Out of nowhere, God blindsides us.

He interrupts our living.

He disrupts our dreams.

He intrudes on our plans.

Chuck Swindoll writes that an intrusion “is someone or something that thrusts itself into our world without permission, without an invitation, and refuses to be ignored.” (Day by Day with Charles R. Swindoll)

  

I don’t like such intrusions. I don’t like to have my goals interrupted and my life knocked off the rails. How about you?

But if we’re people who believe God is important, if we’ve committed our lives to Him, we must listen when He disrupts.

Recently I heard Rev. James Broughton III say something like this: “God interrupts your life and then he disrupts your life. If you don’t like disruptions, stay away from God.”

And so it was that at the beginning of my memoir, God (with help from my husband Dave) interrupted my comfortable life. Disrupted my serenity.

They both were disregarding my plans and dreams—and waiting for me to do the same.

If I went along with God, if I did things His way, the life I’d planned would get tossed upside down and inside out.

Life became confusing. The pain in the core of my being zapped the breath out of me. I struggled to make sense of what my life meant to me, of what my husband and two preschoolers meant to me—and what God meant to me. And what the four of us meant to God.

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, 

neither are your ways my ways, 

declares the Lord. 

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, 

so are my ways higher than your ways 

and my thoughts than your thoughts.” 

(Isaiah 55:8-9)

“The world bombards us . . . telling us that unless we have the newest, the biggest and the best we will never be happy. But God says, ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness’” (Matthew 6:33). (From The Bible Study)

Gulp. I had been thinking and planning like a self-centered, materialistic suburbanite determined to chase after the American dream.

This was a wake-up call telling me to bend my thinking more toward God’s perspective.

He seemed to be saying, “My purposes for you are different than what you always expected. And my purposes for you are good.”

“God is … quietly, invisibly, secretly planning our steps; feeding us our lines; moving us into position; unifying everything we do,” writes Lawrence Kushner.

“We are chastened to realize that what we thought was an accident was, in truth, the hand of God. Most of the time we are simply unaware. Awareness takes too much effort, and besides, it’s more fun to pretend we are running the show. 

"But every now and then we understand, just for a moment, that God has all along been involved in everything. As Rabbi Zaddok HaKohen taught, ‘The first premise of faith is to believe with perfect faith that there is no such thing as happenstance.… Every detail, small or great, they are all from the Holy One.’ Everything is organically, seamlessly joined to everything else and run by God.…” (Lawrence Kushner, Eyes Remade for Wonder)

BAM! Out of nowhere, God had blindsided me. 

He was giving me a wake-up call.

I had a lot of thinking to do.  

A lot of reconsidering to do. 

A lot of praying to do.