Rejoicing in a Life of Interruptions
How God uses frustrating moments
After my mom died, my dad shared with me about the Sunday School lesson he’d been preparing for that week. It was about how to maintain a biblical perspective on life’s “interruptions.”
As mom struggled with Parkinson’s and other health issues in recent years, they’d dealt with numerous interruptions. Her death was the most tragic for him, but it wasn’t the last we faced.
I stayed with him for a week or so after her death to help take care of some things, including selling her car. I went through an online car buyer, found an acceptable price, and set a time for us to drive to their dealership.
As I’m on the road to the appointment, I noticed the car seemed to hiccup. A few miles down the road, it backfires, a puff of black smoke shoots from the tailpipe, and the car dies on the interstate.
My dad, who had been following behind me in his truck, pulled over with me, shook his head, and just said, “Interruptions.”
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Of all the times for this car to break down, it had to do it then. Earlier in the week, I’d driven it without issue. But this, probably the most inopportune possible time, was the moment for this interruption.
Almost a month later, the car mechanic called and said he’d finally figured out the problem. Somehow, two wires had gotten loose. As long as they didn’t touch, the car worked fine. If they touched, the engine shut down.
Where is the fairness, the cosmic justice in that? My mom dies, and her car breaks down as we’re driving to sell it. Of all the times, why would God allow those two wires to touch in that exact moment? Why that interruption at that time?
Interruptions are the language we use to describe these types of circumstances that seem to burst uninvited into our lives at the worst possible time. In reality, however, these interruptions are our lives, as C.S. Lewis learned.
C.S. Lewis’ Interruptions
In 1943, Lewis wrote to his childhood best friend Arthur Greeves to confide that circumstances in his home were “pretty bad.” Mrs. Moore’s health and demeanor were rapidly declining. As a result, domestic help was growing harder to find, leaving more work for Lewis to do around the Kilns.
At that same time, Lewis was overwhelmed by his academic responsibilities as well as what he felt were personal responsibilities that accompanied his growing fame. Letters piled in. He felt compelled to respond to them all by hand despite debilitating rheumatism that often made his handwriting barely legible. The pain had grown so bad that he couldn’t sleep on his right side.
In his difficult circumstances, Lewis told Greeves:
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 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. This is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time …
Lewis had been working through that idea of interruptions for a few years. Or, it may be more appropriate to say, God had been working to impress the idea into Lewis for a few years.
Five years earlier, in a 1938 letter to Owen Barfield, Lewis confessed that he thought he had made progress toward understanding the “rightly precarious hold we have on all our natural loves, interests, and comforts,” but “when they are really shaken, at the very first breath of that wind, it turns out to have been all a sham.”
Reflecting on this realization, he wrote:
… part of oneself still regards troubles as ‘interruptions’ as if (ludicrous idea) the happy bustle of one’s personal interests was our real ἔργον,1 instead of the opposite.
I did in the end see (I dare not say ‘feel’) that since nothing but these forcible shakings will cure us of our worldliness, we have at bottom reason to be thankful for them. We force God to surgical treatment: we won’t (mentally) diet.
Eternal perspective
The interruption with my mom’s car is not one of those stories where I can say that I know exactly why it happened. I’m not looking back and seeing how God saved us from some greater danger by causing the car to shut down at that moment. That could be the case, but I’ll likely never know this side of eternity.
More likely, the reason for this and any other interruption is similar to Lewis’—to give me an eternal perspective. As Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain:
The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bath or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
Despite frequent moments in my life that seem like interruptions, I know that He is a good God and those interruptions serve a purpose. I trust, as Paul wrote in Romans 8:28,2 that He is working all things together for my good.
Often, what I need most is a reminder that interruptions are a part, even a necessary part, of the life God is giving me. They rouse me from self-focused sleep to a waking worship of my Savior. We can rejoice in life’s interruptions because they interrupt our temporal focus and lift our eyes to eternity.
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Church closures eclipse openings in U.S. — Lifeway Research
“Task” or “work” in Greek.
We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. (CSB)