Have you ever been interrupted?

I don’t mean someone steps on your conversation.

Your wife decides to leave you—out of the blue! Totally unexpected—just didn’t see it coming, man. You’ve got three little kids. 

Your boss calls you in with the news that you’ve been chosen to take a permanent vacation from this job. Or, your five year old struggling business just couldn’t weather the recent recession, you’ve totally run out of savings and you’ve closed the doors. Bankruptcy looks like the only next step.

You learn that your youngest daughter, age about 30, has been diagnosed with a particular illness, a terminal one, and she has two small children. Or, you learn your teenage son was killed in an automobile accident an hour ago.

This blog today isn’t just about the question of why bad things happen to good people. It’s really more about what do you do when your life and your life’s big dreams get interrupted? Where do you look? What do you look for?

Some say that Christians have an easier time of it than non believers. I’m not at all sure of that. But, Christians do have an arrow that others may not realize is available. Prayer. But I think, unfortunately, that Christians misunderstand that arrow and misuse it. That’s why they don’t necessarily have the easier path to recovery.

Craig Barnes in his book, When God Interrupts points out that when the interruption happens and doesn’t just go away on its own, Christians pray, pray, pray and pray some more for God to fix it. And when God doesn’t fix it, we Christians believe we are somehow deficient in our faith or didn’t pray hard enough. So we pray, pray, pray some more. When he still doesn’t fix it, we’re devastated and can’t figure out why God would do that to us. After all, we were living that beautiful dream well, and he seemed pleased with what we were doing. No reason at all for an interruption!

It’s perfectly okay, perfectly natural to pray for the fix, Barnes says, but that alone is a misdirection. Pray also that your relationship with God be better, be healed, or restored, or just that he make your walk with him a little closer. After all, that’s the real healing, don’t you think? I know a lot of people who found their “problem” fixed to their satisfaction when that wasn’t the main focus of their prayers. Becoming closer and closer to Jesus fixes a lot of other things in our little lives.