A DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT by Pastor Scott
Interruptions Along the Way
Years ago, Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson wrote the book The One Minute Manager. Perhaps you read it, or at least have heard of it. It is a business management tool focusing on how to manage your time in short increments with specific goals for each interval. It was, and is, a helpful tool for vocational management.
Wouldn’t it be great if our lives could be broken down so we could deal with things within distinct segments of time? There would be one minute to assess our strategy for getting out of bed. One minute to calculate our success in getting our wardrobe lined up. One minute to get ready for the day…shower, hair done, shave/makeup, teeth brushed…well, maybe a bit more than one minute for these undertakings.
You get the idea. You could compartmentalize your day and assess your progress by your ability to accomplish your “one minute” targets.
As you well know, life doesn’t work that way. Even if I go to bed with a perfect strategy for my “first minute” of getting up the next morning, the strategy is wrecked if I fall out of bed and have to regather myself, haul myself up onto the bed and then try again at getting myself upright. It’s the “first minute and I am already five minutes behind.
I don’t think God is so much concerned about our minutes as He is about our “moments.”
God is a God of moments and interruptions. When we are drawn into the lives of the people in the Bible, we realize that their lives and experiences are often marked by moments and interruptions that weren’t planned or expected, but provided opportunities to encounter the Eternal God.
They don’t always capture the moment, or even recognize it as a moment with God, but sometimes they do. What if Moses had just walked right by the burning bush because it wasn’t in his schedule and missed God’s message to him? What if Abraham had ignored the ram in the thicket and, well, what would have happened to Isaac? What if Mary had helped Martha in the kitchen instead of listening at Jesus feet?
God’s interruptions in our lives are powerful and we cannot predict them. But we can live with a heart of anticipation and expectancy of a God interruption. We can desire moments with Him. To be “first-hand” with our faith is to have the faith to expect God to interrupt our lives giving us an opportunity to encounter the Eternal God.
Can you look back at your life and recognize some of those “God interruptions” that came across your life path? Can you grasp the significance of God interrupting you, drawing close to you, guiding you, and growing your faith and trust in Him? At the time you may not have valued those moments or even fathomed their impact upon you, but God was shaping you. He was loving you. He was with you. He was, and is, a moment-to-moment, loving, heavenly Father.
Working together with him, then, we appeal to you
not to receive the grace of God in vain.
For he says, “In a favorable time I listened to you,
and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”
Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.
II Corinthians 6:1-2 (ESV)
Be open to interruptions this week, they may be God-given opportunities to experience God work in you or through you!
