The Sauntering Pilgrim

If you want to make the most of your life and fulfill your highest purpose, business experts and life coaches tell us, you need to stay focused on your dream or goal and resist distractions and interruptions as much as possible. By letting go of distractions and avoiding interruptions, you’ll increase your prospects of arriving at your destination and achieving the greatest success in your career.

It’s an ancient spiritual practice, that when we’re distracted from our focus or purpose, we recognize the distraction and let it go, like a cloud passing by. We return to our focus, recentering ourselves in what we’re about. That’s partly why we have sabbath days, occasions to retreat from the world to recenter ourselves in God. It’s why Jesus told us, when we pray, to withdraw into a place of solitude and close the door (Matt. 6:6). Avoid distractions and defend against interruptions.

But distractions are hard to avoid. According to one survey, 40% of those responding reported experiencing more than ten interruptions per day, with 15% reporting more than twenty interruptions per day. A wide range of professionals report being interrupted every six to twelve minutes. And because we have a fundamental need for completion, it’s quite difficult to switch our attention to the interruption, so we end up performing the interrupting tasks poorly (“A Plan  for Managing [Constant] Interruptions at Work,” Harvard Business Review, 30 June 2020).

But sometimes a steadfast adherence to the path we’re on can be the distraction. Sometimes we can be so focused on our purpose, it distracts us from God’s purpose. Then, what we consider an interruption can be an opportunity return our attention to God and our essential purpose in life. What appears to be an interruption in our plans might be a spiritual intervention to bring us back to God’s will for us.

Consider what happened to Paul and Silas during their visit to Philippi (Acts 16:16-34). As they were going to a place of prayer, they were interrupted by a demon-possessed slave-girl who earned money for her owners by fortunetelling. She annoyed Paul and Silas so much, Paul lost his temper and healed her. He ordered the demon to leave her, and it did. His interruption turned out to be an opportunity for healing someone else.

But the interruption of Paul’s and Silas’s plans was about more than healing a slave-girl. Paul’s healing of the girl also resulted in the financial undoing of her owners: “their hope of making money was gone” (v. 19). Even more than that, the healing of that girl threatened the social and economic foundations of the city. “These men are disturbing our city,” the girl’s owners charged as they hauled Paul and Silas off to court (v. 20). The crowd joined the attack, and Paul and Silas were beaten and thrown into jail.

The story tells of one interruption after another. Paul and Silas were interrupted on their way to prayer; the girl’s course of life was interrupted by her healing; the girl’s owners’ exploitive business practice was interrupted as they were deprived of their chief asset; the economic system of the city was interrupted as personal healing played out in broad systemic implications. Living the gospel means living a life full of interruptions for ourselves and the social, economic, and political systems in which we live.

Jesus gave himself freely to what we would consider interruptions. The teaching, healing, and wonders we see in his life were often unplanned responses to interruptions. He trusted that what God allowed to cross his path was something from God, God’s intended interruption, an invitation for his attention. Jesus was always willing to be interrupted by grace.

It’s been said that the briefest definition of religion is one word: interruption. When the journey we’re on is interrupted and our plans come to naught, when the light that illuminated our path grows dark and we lose our way, that may be our invitation to renew our bonds to the source and sustainer of life. According to farmer and essayist Wendell Berry, “It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

If we will allow it, especially if we as the church will allow, we will view every interruption as an invitation to consider our priorities in life and return to them. We’ll see them as invitations to the real work to which God calls us. And baffled though we may be, no longer knowing what to do or which way to go, it will become our song to deal faithfully and earnestly with that to which God is calling us.

 “People” – all of us – “who walk in darkness have sought / a light in the heart of the darkest night,” a dark night that obscures our purpose and causes us to lose our way. But “Just when we thought all would be lost, / we were drawn to the light of God” (“Drawn to the Light,” Evangelical Lutheran Worship, hymn 593) – our busyness was interrupted by grace and we were invited home to the light of God. Before you resist that next interruption or give in to irritation and impatience, consider whether it might be the opportunity you need to give God more complete attention.