Plan to Be Interrupted

Article by Scott Hubbard

At one time, I thought the best test for our faith in the sovereignty of God was our fidelity to the five points of Calvinism. But lately I’ve wondered if a different test might be more appropriate: how we respond to the interruptions, inefficiencies, and unforeseen delays strewn throughout our days.

Many of us cheer at the high sovereignty celebrated by Charles Spurgeon:

I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less than God wishes — that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens — that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their courses. (“God’s Providence”)

Yet where do our cheers go (or my cheers, at any rate) when God, in his providence, arranges the particles in his universe against our plans for the day? When our computer mutinies, or our toddler summons the attention of the entire grocery store, or our coworker knocks in the midst of our brilliant productivity? Too often, my internal response amounts to the following: “The dust motes may be subject to God’s rule, but this must have slipped past his sovereignty.”

But the God who is sovereign over our salvation is sovereign also over our schedules, including all the interruptions.

Faith, Not Efficiency

We cannot say that God has left us unprepared for such interruptions. Scripture’s story of redemption does not give the impression that efficiency is one of God’s chief values. If it were, the Bible’s plotline would be much straighter (and much less interesting). Over and again, God hands his people some important piece of work to do — work we might imagine is simply too important to be delayed — and then he bids his people to trust him through interruption.

“We want to move through our tasks without interruption; he wants us to trust him in every interruption.”

He tells Nehemiah to build the wall around Jerusalem, and then he allows a host of enemies to halt the work for a time (Nehemiah 4:7–14). He calls Jeremiah to prophesy in Judah, and then ordains that he should be tossed into a cistern (Jeremiah 38:1–6). He commissions Paul to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, and then lands him in a prison cell (Philippians 1:12–13). Time would fail to tell of Joseph’s wait in Egypt, of David’s flights from Saul, and of the multitudes who intercepted Jesus as he was heading somewhere else.

What do we make of such sovereign delays? Apparently, as Jon Bloom writes, “God is not nearly as interested in our efficiency as he is in our faith.” Regularly, even if subconsciously, we walk into our days with efficiency as our agenda: fold the laundry and write the paper and cook the meal and prepare the Bible study and get to bed with no task unchecked. Yet often, God’s agenda for us is not efficiency, but faith — for “without faith it is impossible to please him” (Hebrews 11:6).

We want to move through our tasks without interruption; he wants us to trust him in every interruption. And so, he will regularly, even daily, disrupt our plans.

Counterfeit Interruptions

So faith, not efficiency, is God’s main agenda for us each day. As we consider how we might prepare for the daily interruptions he sends our way, we would do well to keep one clarification in mind: we should not receive every interruption as a holy interruption — as a God-sent, sanctifying inefficiency. Not every interruption is created equal.

For many of us today, interruption is the air we breathe. We can scarcely go fifteen minutes without our phone buzzing, our email binging, our calendar reminding, our news app updating, our social media flagging. We have grown accustomed to a mind fragmented by technology. Indeed, many of us have grown more than accustomed — we enjoy the quarter-hour (or more) dopamine hit that our smartphones provide. If separated from our screens for an afternoon, we might fidget like someone in withdrawal.

Interruptions such as these rarely sanctify. In fact, they regularly do the opposite. Instead of propelling us into the lives of the neighbors around us at that moment (Matthew 22:39), they lure us to give our best attention elsewhere. Instead of slowing us down to listen (James 1:19), they train us in the sorry arts of swiping, skimming, and “multitasking.” Instead of inviting us to cast our burdens on God (1 Peter 5:6–7), they regularly feed low-level anxiety. Yet too often, I resent the interruption from my neighbor next door, yet relish the one from my news feed.

By all means, bolt the door against such interruptions. Turn off notifications for stretches of the day. Decide how often you’ll check your email. When you go to sleep (or better, well before you do), put your phone to sleep as well. Whatever it takes, cultivate the kind of calm and focused mind that is ready to receive real interruptions.

Enough Margin for Love

Beyond ridding ourselves of counterfeit interruptions, we might consider another practical step toward welcoming the interruptions God sends: leave enough margin in your schedule for love. Margin is the blank space on our calendars and our to-do lists — the empty, unplanned parts of the day that are available for the unexpected.

Perhaps interruptions frustrate some of us because we simply have no margin. I sometimes pack one appointment or task on top of another, leaving me to run between responsibilities with little room to breathe in between — and no room for interruptions. Such planning (at least for most of us, most of the time) reflects an almost laughable amount of hubris, as if I expect the minutes to march on according to my good pleasure.

“Those who trust deeply in the sovereignty of God learn to leave enough margin in their days for sovereign interruptions.”

Consider how Jesus lived. For as full as his schedule was, he was never so booked that he could not linger for a few minutes on the way. Have you ever noticed just how often he is interrupted? How regularly a disciple or stranger interjects (Luke 12:13)? How commonly someone on the roadside cries for help (Mark 10:46–48)? How frequently even his meals were invaded by the needs of a neighbor (Luke 7:36–38)? And have you ever noticed how Jesus was never flustered or rushed?

When the Son of God walked among us, he was perfect in patience. And not only because he was the Son of God, but also because he had the healthy, sane realism to expect interruptions and to leave enough room in his life to love his neighbor. How many times have we become irritated at interruptions because, unlike Jesus, we had no space in our schedule for them? In that case, repentance means more than pleading with God for patience; it also means planning more space in our schedules.

Those who trust deeply in the sovereignty of God learn to leave enough margin in their days for sovereign interruptions. Because faith not only relies on God when the interruptions come; it also plans for interruptions before they come. It leaves pockets of the day and week blank, and over the rest it writes, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15).

Far Better Plans

Even still, a focused mind and a schedule with margin will not prepare us for every interruption. Many interruptions will come our way that feel inconvenient and unwelcome. And in such moments, we do well to step back, catch our breath, pray, and remember all the good that God sends through interruptions.

Think big for a moment. Where would we be if God hadn’t interrupted Abraham in Haran, Moses in Midian, David among the sheepfolds, Mary in her betrothed innocence, Peter in his fishing boat, Paul on the road to Damascus? And where would you be if he hadn’t interrupted your life — if Jesus hadn’t invaded your comfortable rebellion and beckoned you to repent and believe?

Once God turns our lives upside down, he doesn’t stop using interruptions (large or small) for our good. Through them, he chastens our pride, slows our pace, opens our eyes, bends us toward dependence, and teaches us to trust. He reminds us that he is not after our maximum efficiency, but instead our maximum conformity to Christ, who was never too busy, too preoccupied, or too impatient to be interrupted.

If we know all that God does through interruptions, we may do more than avoid them: after we’ve planned the best we can, we may even pray that he would be pleased to interrupt us with his better, perfect plans.

Scott Hubbard is a graduate of Bethlehem College & Seminary and an editor for desiringGod.org. He and his wife, Bethany, live with their son in Minneapolis.

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Your Unfulfulled Desires are a Treasury, Not a Tragedy

by Tyler Greene

“And I pleaded with the LORD at that time, saying, ‘O Lord GOD, you have only begun to show your servant your greatness and your mighty hand. For what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do such works and mighty acts as yours? Please let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan, that good hill country and Lebanon.’ But the LORD was angry with me because of you and would not listen to me. And the LORD said to me, ‘Enough from you; do not speak to me of this matter again. Go up to the top of Pisgah and lift up your eyes westward and northward and southward and eastward, and look at it with your eyes, for you shall not go over this Jordan. But charge Joshua, and encourage and strengthen him, for he shall go over at the head of this people, and he shall put them in possession of the land that you shall see.’” (Deuteronomy 3:23-28)

Four decades—that’s how long Moses had invested his life to lead the nation of Israel toward the land God had promised to Abraham (Gen. 12:7). However, as the Lord would have it, he would never set foot on Canaanite soil. That privilege would be left to Joshua. Of course, this is a source of tension for Moses—an unfulfilled desire that had been nagging him ever since the incident at the waters of Meribah (Num. 20:12). Even though he “pleaded with the Lord” to reconsider, his admission into the Promised Land would not be granted.

This episode in Moses’s life beckons an important question for our own: what should we do with our unfulfilled desires—those sources of unresolved tension in our lives that have left us disappointed, devastated, or despondent? Sadly, too few of us are equipped to face such a question. Ronald Rolheiser observes, “We stand before life too full of expectations that cannot be realized…we are convinced that all lack, all tension, all unfulfilled yearning is tragic.” Whether it pertains to romance and sexuality, career, sickness and disease, parenting, or ministry, many assume that to live with unmet expectations is an insufferable misery that must be resolved as quickly as possible. However, the Bible offers a different perspective. It reveals that while we are fixated on what we don’t have, God’s focus is on what we are becoming for the sake of His purpose.

This is what happened to Moses. Silenced by divine rebuke, he stopped pleading with God about his unmet expectations and started listening. God’s Word on the matter would result in Moses being consumed with one burning passion for his remaining days—to see God’s people love, worship, and obey Him under Joshua’s leadership and beyond (Deut. 4-32). By not getting what he wanted, he became what God wanted, which is infinitely better.

Perhaps God wants to do something similar through your unfulfilled desires. Maybe that’s why He’s not answering your prayers the way you’d like. Could it be that He wants to use the tension you feel to prepare you for His purpose in a specific way? Is it possible that He wants you to become something that will make a difference in someone else’s life?

Our Lord Himself, having experienced all that is common to man, is not unfamiliar with unfulfilled desires and the role they can play in God’s greater purpose. With the cross looming on the horizon, He prayed, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me” (Matt. 26:39). The cup, of course, would not pass from Him. But had it happened any other way, there would be no gospel, and we would be eternally shut out of the kingdom of heaven. In a sense, then, God’s only “no” to Jesus turned out to be the only way He could say "yes" to sinners. And Jesus, knowing this, surrendered His desire, praying that God’s purpose would prevail: “Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.”

In the end, we must accept that there are times when God chooses not to fulfill our desires. Yet we must recognize that such times, though difficult, are sovereignly orchestrated opportunities out of which we are being called to “bear more fruit” for the kingdom of God (Jn. 15:2). By not fulfilling Moses’s desires, God prepared Joshua and the Israelites for their entrance into the Promised Land; by not allowing the cup to pass from Jesus, full atonement was made so that eternal life could be offered to the world. What about you? Have you thought about how your unfulfilled desires might have an important part to play in God’s purpose?

Don’t believe for a moment that the longings you have long felt can be written off as a tragedy you must survive. Instead you must see them as a treasury that is brimming with potential blessing, fruitfulness, and eternal glory. Perhaps, then, the greatest tragedy of all would be that you never become the kind of person who can say, “Not my will but yours be done” and truly mean it.

Tyler Greene

Tyler Greene serves as the Associate Pastor of Worship Ministries for LifePoint Church in Ozark, MO. He resides near Ozark with his wife Erin and their three children. 

The Reality of Disappointment

by Jeremy Pierre

Life is one long, steady disappointment. This dawns on most people by their thirties. Childhood is all potentiality. The teenage years are all angst—but even angst betrays some hope, since it is only quiet outrage that things could be better. A person can still carry into his twenties the illusion that the world will soon blossom. Not until his thirties does a person realize that much of what’s coming won’t be better than what has come. The forties, fifties, and on often only reinforce Alexander Pope’s infamous beatitude, “Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” To live is to be disappointed.

So cheer up. Oddly enough, disappointment can be an indicator you are seeing the world correctly. No one enjoys feeling disappointment. In itself, disappointment is akin to the sadness of loss, and ultimately we were not designed for it. But like all emotions, disappointment is a gauge of how a person perceives his life—what he believes about it and wants from it. When you’re living in a broken world, sometimes believing and wanting the right things means you’ll be disappointed.

THE EXPERIENCE OF DISAPPOINTMENT

Human beings are capable of disappointment because they are capable of having expectations. We were made to dream of better days. Every Cleveland sports fan knows this. So does every acne-faced teenager, every sleepless parent of a newborn, every young professional clawing for a career, every recent divorcée sitting in a house now quiet. All of us cast in our minds a widescreen projection of a better reality to move around in, free of the most painful parts of the present. We live in a desert but imagine a garden.

Disappointment is what we experience when that garden never blooms. Of course, we know it won’t blossom immediately. But maybe it will incrementally? Maybe in the next phase of life? Maybe around the next bend? All of these maybes are the projectors on the screen of the mind. What they project we could call expectations.

We experience disappointment as a sense of loss when reality fails to meet our expectations. The key words there are reality and expectations, and both of these terms are charged with theological meaning.

Disappointment is a gauge of how a person perceives his life—what he believes about it and wants from it.SHARE

A THEOLOGY OF DISAPPOINTMENT

Reality is the world that surrounds us, a world that existed before any of us first took in a lungful of oxygen. The world is a given component of our experience, the context we are born into and move around in. It is beyond our control, it is outside our determination, and it operates according to laws we had no say in laying down. Reality is, well, reality. And it constantly fails to match the Eden we love to inhabit in our minds.

Reality is the world in which God placed us. It’s easy to overlook the theological significance of Genesis 2:8: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” God made Adam to be an embodied image of Him in a physical location. This world preceded Adam. It was outside his determination yet under his dominion to be the context of his obedience (1:28). Adam could not have simply lived in his head; he had to traffic in a reality outside his head.

Expectations, on the other hand, are a human response to reality; and as responses, we do have a say in them. Expectations are part hope, part prediction of what reality will be. They are part hope in the sense that they are an expectancy of good. No one is disappointed when something bad they were expecting fails to come about; instead, they experience relief. Hope is the anticipation that reality will be characterized by greater joy, greater provision, greater accomplishment, greater peace.

Adam lost his spot in an ideal reality by disobeying God, who sent him and his wife out of Eden and into the ultimate disappointment of a world stalked by death and decay (Gen. 3:8–24). A world that was once generous with fruit became hostile with thorns. This is the reality that Adam’s grandchildren have inherited. But they’ve also inherited the memory of that garden. Our very ability to be disappointed shows that we carry expectations of a world better than the one we live in.

So, in a sense, disappointment is an accurate response to a disappointing world. We see disappointed expectations all over the place in Scripture—from Job cursing the day he was born, to the sons of Korah comparing this place to the land of the dead, to Paul describing creation itself as groaning in pain and disillusionment (Job 3:3; Ps. 88:12; Rom. 8:19–22). This collective disappointment is a sure sign that we know to expect more.

So, how do we process our personal disappointment? Here are a few principles.

Your specific disappointments are only the manifestations of a broader disappointment. As we acknowledged at the outset, life is one long, steady disappointment. This long disappointment manifests itself in a thousand short ones. Broken families, failed careers, declining health. Years of planning and labor that result only in more uncertainty, not less. Fear that your adult children won’t carry on the values of the family. Relationships that should have been lifelong don’t even attain their half-life. Or perhaps worst of all, you’ve attained the objects of your desire, and they simply fail to deliver what they promised.

These regular disappointments are about so much more than the situation that’s disappointing you. The wise man of Ecclesiastes, sitting under the swaying fruit trees of his sunlit garden, feasting with fawning dignitaries from around the world, stared blankly into the sky, saying, “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl. 1:14).

The Preacher’s disappointment was not ultimately about the trees or the food or the dignitaries. His disappointment was an all-encompassing realization not simply that this world doesn’t provide ultimate satisfaction, but that it can’t provide ultimate satisfaction. Your specific disappointments are only your personal realization of this same reality.

If you want to handle disappointment in a godly way, you must start by simply acknowledging that your specific disappointments are not exclusive to you. The world is not uniquely unfair to you. It is unfair to everyone. To think that your own disappointments are a greater burden to you than those of others are to them will lead quickly to self-pity and to self-pity’s more subtle cousin, self-hatred.

Your disappointments may show that your expectations don’t line up with what God says about reality. God tells us the world is broken. Your disappointments may be because you expected more out of this world than God said it would deliver. Everyone secretly prefers an immediate return to the old garden over patient endurance to the new one. But God says that this world is marked by futility and difficulty. The happiness we experience is genuine, but it is fleeting. The question is, are we willing to accept God’s description of life in a fallen world?

Take, for instance, the types of disappointment I just mentioned: a broken family, a failed career, or declining health. God, indeed, designed family to provide intimacy and security, but in a fallen world, relationships are broken. Expecting an ideal family has prevented many people from enjoying their actual family. Work and career are an essential part of our calling, meant to provide satisfaction and provision, but in a fallen world, careers are not guaranteed. Expecting an ideal career makes us anxious about a job we might otherwise enjoy. The same is true for personal health. God made the human body to heal itself, but our fallen condition is evident in every ache and pain. Our longing for perfect health can make us unthankful for each day of life.

We expect a world untouched by the fall. When we do that, we are insisting on our own version of what the world ought to be, rather than trusting God in the world that is.

Your disappointments may, on the other hand, show that your expectations do line up with what God says about reality. Even though God tells you the world is broken, He also tells you it shouldn’t be. Your disappointments may show that you agree with Him. You feel the sorrow of a broken family because you know we were made for intimacy. You are disillusioned at the unexpected loss of your job because God designed work to yield reward. You are frustrated with a body that won’t respond how you want it to because you know God made bodies to be whole. The difference between expectations that line up with God’s and those that don’t is in your willingness to submit to God’s testimony of what your life is: plagued with difficulty for now in order to sharpen your desire for the world to come. The grief of realizing the world is broken can be a platform to worship the God who even now is preparing an unbroken world.

Your disappointments should provoke two actions from you: lamentation and seeking. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes teaches us to lament our disappointment. To lament means to give a faith-filled complaint to God. Expressing our disappointments to God is the opposite of harboring them in our souls. Lament is a way of releasing our expectations to Him, trusting Him to restore the situation according to His wisdom and His timing.

The people of faith in Hebrews 11 teach us to seek a better country. Faith makes people act oddly in their present reality: they don’t settle for it. Land-dwellers build boats to save themselves from coming destruction. Wealthy men leave everything to wander. Disgraced old women give birth to nations. Princes identify with slaves to gain a better kingdom. Prostitutes become the only ones with eyes to see a better life. All were dissatisfied with the present in hope of a better future—future with God.

So cheer up. Disappointment can be refined for good use. If our present reality teaches us to lament and to seek, we are well on our way through this long, steady disappointment. And in the unbroken world that awaits us, we will solidly arrive at disappointment’s end.

Dr. Jeremy Pierre is dean of students and assistant professor of biblical counseling at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., a pastor at Clifton Baptist Church, and coauthor of The Pastor and Counseling.

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