Finding God in the Unexpected Interruptions of Life
Late that night, the disciples were in their boat in the middle of the lake, and Jesus was alone on land. He saw that they were in serious trouble, rowing hard and struggling against the wind and waves. About three o’clock in the morning Jesus came toward them, walking on the water. He intended to go past them, but when they saw him walking on the water, they cried out in terror, thinking he was a ghost. They were all terrified when they saw him. But Jesus spoke to them at once. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Take courage! I am here!”
(Mark 6:47-50, NLT, emphasis added)
I wasn’t planning on coming home.
Over the course of four years, I repeatedly informed my parents of my plans to strike out on my own after college, in the hope that they’d be prepared when the fateful day came for me to pack my bags and move into a Chicago apartment with nothing but my seemingly unbreakable spirit.
But to my dismay, a few months before graduation, I broke. Amidst a tempest of depression, a tumultuous relationship that ended in a break-up days before graduation, and overwhelming anxiety regarding post-graduation plans, the ground fell out from beneath me. For the first time in my life, my future felt interrupted and unpredictable. A year later, eating my words, I moved back into my parent’s house, where God was waiting for me.
Full of pride and terror, I faced an ordinary life quite different from what I expected for myself as an artist. Only a few months after moving home, COVID-19 morphed from rumor to reality, and in a day, our lives were irreversibly altered. As the months crawled by, I found–and continue to find–myself repeatedly staring down a dichotomy: would I embrace this quiet story in which I found myself, or would I resist and attempt to place myself inside a different story entirely?
Jesus’ life, like ours, was constantly punctuated by interruptions.
Frequently approached by weeping soldiers, questioning priests, marginalized women and sick children all pleading for mercy, Jesus–filled with compassion–pivoted every time.
Jesus fed the five thousand when he was intending on spending time with God in grief and quiet after the death of his cousin, John the Baptist. Jesus calls Peter to him on the water, and calms the storm, when he intended to cross the sea alone. Jesus healed a woman’s body (and her social standing), on the way to heal a soldier's daughter.
All while he was on the way somewhere else, Jesus restored the broken parts of life simply by seeing people who were right in front of him. He lived in a way that welcomed interruption, never saying, "I don't have time for that," or, "I don't have time for you." He acknowledged the interruptions like sacred appointments because his slow, small life moved in a way that allowed for it.
Over the past four years, I have painstakingly realized the only way we will persist through interruptions that will inevitably shake our plans is by embracing the life we find ourselves living, and embracing the change that follows rather than running from it.
By opening our clenched fists, refusing to give our schedule the final word, and opening our hands and hearts to the gifts that might be hiding inside the inconvenient. By being present to the presence of God with us.
Whether a virus or a telephone call, a cancelled flight or a crying child, a pregnancy or a test result, what might such presence look like for you?
When our journey redirects, what would it look like to hold the pain, unease, and discomfort, while simultaneously acknowledging the surprising connection, joy, passion, clarity and love that grow in the shifting?
One of my favorite things about poetry is the beauty of line breaks. At a glance, we might assume the breaks obstruct the flow of thought. However, after spending time with a poem, we realize how the line breaks emphasize the words before and after them. What at first appears to interrupt the sentence actually clarifies the meaning.
As we learn to live in the line breaks, we slowly realize how beauty rests in the quiet moments of the in-between. There God surprises us, waits for us to pay generous attention to the holy appointments we might have otherwise named irrelevant or unwelcome. It is there we weep and ache, and it is there that we grow and are held. God came and has come to us, not often in the way we expect, but always with intention, purpose and specificity.
I’ve been home for two and a half years. In the forced rest of the pandemic, I’ve struggled to make friends and rekindled relationships with family and lost my way and discovered a writer and a poet inside myself, a part of me that was waiting to be given space to come out. God met me in the wilderness of unexpected interruption, calling me by name.
In spite of the discomfort of interruption, we can take heart, because in the midst of small boats on bumpy seas, Jesus enters in.
