Learning to Love Interruptions

Okay, I'm gonna jump into uh the message today.

We're gonna this month, we're gonna focus on a topic, and and the name of the series is interrupted.

Interrupted.

Um, the origin of this concept uh actually came from a staff devotional.

Every Monday here at the church, uh our our staff, we have a different staff member, we'll we'll do a staff devo, and uh I don't know how long it was, a few weeks ago, uh Blair, who is our kids' pastor, did one in Mark chapter 5, and it was so good.

Mark 5 · chapter mention

I mean, she went all the way through Mark 5, talked about it being interrupted, talked about interruptions, and it so inspired me.

I just did a deep dive in the text.

I asked, I asked Blair to help me work on these messages, and we collabed a bit.

And uh I found some nuggets within this text that I want to share with you, uh, and I hope that it'll be a blessing to you.

We're actually gonna start in in uh Mark chapter 5, verse 21, where it says, uh Jesus got into the boat again and went back to the other side of the lake, where a large crowd gathered around him on the shore.

Mark 5:21

Then a leader of the local synagogue, whose name was Jairus, arrived.

And when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet, pleading fervently with him.

My little daughter is dying, he said.

Please come and lay your hands on her, heal her so she can live.

Please shut the back door if you if you wouldn't mind.

That would help me concentrate and fight my ADD.

Verse 24, Jesus went with him and all the people followed, crowding around him.

All right, let's open in prayer.

Lord, we thank you for the opportunity to be here.

We uh submit ourselves to you.

We open up our ears and our minds and our hearts to hear your word.

Uh Lord, we want to be doers of your word, not just hearers.

How tragic to know something and not to do it.

Lord, we know that we will be blessed according to the word that we apply, not just of what we hear.

So help us to be receptive.

God, I pray that you would take your word and do what only you can do, which is to take a collective group of people and to focus in and to customize a message to every recipient heart.

We love you and we praise you, we thank you, and all God's people said amen.

If we look at Mark 5 in its context, okay, in other words, to summarize the entire Mark chapter 5, you'll see that at the beginning of Mark 5, Jesus casts a demon, or actually a whole bunch of demons, out of a man and casts the demons into a bunch of pigs that then immediately commit suicide.

Mark 5 · chapter mention

These pigs like kill themselves, and it's just kind of this big crazy sort of dramatic scene.

And this guy who now has gone from that sort of bondage to now a new type of freedom is thrilled about it, and he wants to pay Jesus back by following him and serving him.

And Jesus says to him, Hey sir, I love your intentions, but I think there's work for you at home.

He said, Go home to your family and go to your neighborhood and help those people get free.

Okay?

They may not have the exact same issue that you have, but they have an issue, and God wants to use you in your community.

And so Jesus gets in the boat and goes back across the Sea of Galilee, and he hits a new uh uh shore, and when he hits the shore, there are people everywhere, a huge crowd of people, and a man named Jairus, who was a local do-gooder.

He served in the um in the synagogue and he served the people, and yet he was just like anybody who likes to help people.

Sometimes you need help.

And so he goes and he goes straight to the feet of Jesus, takes a posture of humility as he bows before him, and he has probably the worst problem I can think of.

His little daughter is on her deathbed, and time is of the essence.

And so he asks Jesus for help.

So Jesus does something interesting.

He he goes with Jairus and he essentially says no to the entire crowd.

He allows Jairus to come to the front of the line and he goes with him on his way to his house.

But while he's on his house, being interrupted by Jairus, Jesus is then interrupted by another person.

The woman with the issue of blood, woman with an issue of blood.

Bible says she had an issue of blood.

She had been hemorrhaging for 10 years and suffered under the care of many physicians.

Instead of getting better, she got worse.

The Bible said she not only suffered physically, but she suffered financially.

She had given all of her money trying to find a remedy, couldn't find one.

And yet there was something about Jesus that gave her hope.

So, because she was bleeding, she was considered to be unclean.

She had to conceal her issue, fight through, forge through the crowd to touch Jesus.

She gets to the hem of his garment, grabs his clothing, and now she's healed.

And Jesus goes, Whoa, what just happened?

And they said, What do you mean?

He said, Well, somebody touched me.

And they're like, Everybody's touching you.

There's people all around you.

What are you talking about?

Jesus said, No.

And so he hunts for this woman in the crowd.

He essentially outs her and he takes her out of her anonymity.

And he begins having a deep, deep, deep conversation with her in the middle of this whole deal.

Jairus, by the way, is doing this.

Gyrus is doing this.

He's going, Lord, come on, we are against the clock.

My daughter is dying.

I need you to go.

I, with all due respect to this woman and her issue, my daughter's is life and death.

We gotta go now.

And Jesus seems to be really patient in ministering to this woman.

So much so that when they get to the end of that time with uh Jesus with the woman, the issue of blood, messengers have now come to Jairus to tell him, Your daughter is dead.

Don't bother the teacher anymore.

It is too late.

Fortunately, that's not the end of the story, but that's where we're gonna pause for today.

I want to talk to you about interruptions, and I want to talk about two different kinds of interruptions today.

The first is the type of interruption that you have the option to avoid or ignore if you so choose.

Jesus represents this option, right?

He comes to the shore, gyrus comes to him.

Jesus certainly could ignore Jairus.

He could choose others.

Certainly, Jairus wasn't the only person among the crowd with a loved one who was dying.

Certainly, Jairus wasn't the only person with an issue around, and Jesus chooses him, but he could have said no, he could have said, Jairus, I'm sorry, but you need to go to the back of the line.

Everybody's struggling, but he didn't.

And so there are some of you today who have an interruption that is in front of you in your life, and you're trying to figure out should I engage with this or should I avoid this?

And you do have that option.

I want to talk to you about that, and maybe I can help you with it.

The second thing is I want to talk to you of those who are like Jairus in that you have an interruption in your life that you cannot avoid.

Jairus's daughter was about to die and she was helpless, and he feels the weight of responsibility.

I didn't ask for this, but I'm being asked to deal with it.

And there are some of you today who have an interruption that is unavoidable.

You have to walk through it.

You've been asked to deal with it, and I want to help you as well.

The first thing uh I want to do is I want to create a little common ground uh as it relates to our thinking.

I'm gonna share with you a tool I've shared before with the church.

So if you've been around a while, this might be a reminder.

Others, it'll be a new piece of content.

But uh it's just something I use on a daily basis.

It's actually what I call uh the frustration.

Frustration gap.

Okay?

The frustration gap is simply when expectation does not meet up with performance.

Okay, so you have an expectation, and let's call your expectation, we'll call it on a scale of one to ten.

Uh you have a ten expectation, and somebody, uh their performance is delivered at an eight.

Okay?

And the only way that you solve, like this right here, the gap between uh eight and ten, that's called frustration.

So the only way you solve that is one of three ways.

Either you raise your performance, somebody raise their performance, somebody else lower their expectation, or we can try to meet it at 9.

Alright, so if my wife says to me, Greg, in order for me to be happy, I need you home every night or five nights a week at 5 p.m.

Okay.

If I show up five nights a week at 6 p.m., the gap between five and six is frustration.

We can solve it.

She can go, you know what, six is good enough.

Cool, frustration's gone.

Or I can raise my performance.

I can make sure I'm there by five, come hell or high water, I'm gonna be there at five, make my wife happy, and then good, we're done.

Or we can figure it out at 5:30, okay?

Those are options.

When it's quantifiable, it's manageable, and it's fairly simple, right?

If you if you're a sales manager, you set goals, smart goals, uh, measurable, attainable, time bound, okay, all of this that you go, it needs to be at this number.

If they missed that number, now we've got something to talk about.

Either we should lower the goal, or you need to step it up, or you're out, or we meet in the middle, you get the idea.

The problem is when it's quant uh qualitative and not quantitative.

Quantitative is easy enough, qualitative's different.

Honey, I feel like you don't love me enough.

What?

What do you what do you mean by that?

Well, I don't know.

I just feel like you don't give me enough attention.

How do I do that?

I don't know, it's just like you don't care about the things I care about.

I binge watched lifetime, okay?

Like I you think that was for me?

Like that was all about you.

But but you were on your phone the whole time.

I needed some anesthesia.

It was come on, like I was multitasking, I was totally present, you know.

But uh, you know, I just I I feel I feel like you're not in invested in me enough.

What do you mean?

You don't look me in the eye.

How long do you need me to?

Uh 10 minutes?

See, that's the problem.

You always want to put time on it.

Ah, okay, so so what I'm saying is qualitative is difficult.

And when we think about the frustration gap, the frustration scale, we think of it primarily in our relationship to people.

And dude, use it all the time.

By the way, don't avoid the quant uh qualitative stuff just because it's hard to define.

You're you're meddling in the right spot.

Eventually you'll get there, but just stay there, don't get discouraged just because it's hard to measure.

Um, but I want to move beyond just our expectations and frustrations with people and actually think about your relationship, your relationship to your plans.

Think about your relationship to your plans.

You have plans that you've made with an expectation.

I have an expectation of the plans that I've made for my career.

I got a career plan, I got a family plan, I got a life plan, I got a health plan.

And so you start with something in your mind's eye, some sort of vision in your mind, and then you build a plan to get there and you make goals.

And in order for you to get there with the SMART goal, you have to be efficient and productive.

And these become our obsessions.

Efficiency and productivity.

The problem is interruption.

Interruption.

When I am emotionally connected to my plan, to my goal, to my vision, and I'm being as efficient and productive as I can, and then an interruption hits me, I am frustrated.

Here's what I would say.

If you ask somebody, how was your day?

How was your day?

And they go, great.

99 times out of a hundred, this is what that means.

I had no interruptions today.

Okay?

I had my task list and I knocked it out.

Check, check, check, check, check, done.

Ah, ah, life is good.

Okay, and by the way, it does feel good, okay?

There's nothing wrong with enjoying having a nice, smooth day, hot knife through butter.

Nobody got my I hit all green lights today.

I had nothing slowing me down today.

And you were able to go all the way through, no interruptions.

I I didn't even have to use my AK.

I have to say it was a good day.

Come on, come on, the great theologian ice cube, don't act like you don't know about it.

It was a good day because I had no interruptions.

The problem is tomorrow you're gonna get interrupted ten times.

Was that a bad day?

That's how we think.

C.S.

Lewis, by the way, says it like this.

C.S.

Lewis said, What one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life.

What one calls one's real life is the phantom of one's own imagination.

Dog on it, C.S.

You got us again.

C.S.

Lewis, he just doesn't miss.

So right.

We think, we think life, real life, is the plan that we've come up with, and so we're so connected to that.

And then when efficiency gets thrown off, when interruptions hit, we think it is now an obstruction to our plan instead of the fact that it is real life and the thing that I thought was real life is just a construction of my mind.

Interruptions are real life.

What are you gonna do with them?

And how do you figure out which ones that you can avoid that you actually engage with?

Let's look at Jesus.

Okay.

Uh, Jesus, if if we go back to Mark 5, we see it says that Jesus got in the boat, and you notice it says he got in the boat again.

Let's look at Jesus' plan and his plan for efficiency and productivity.

Okay, if you were to read all the way through Mark, you would see in Mark chapter 1, Jesus has a plan, and his plan is actually that he is going to crisscross the Sea of Galilee.

Mark 1 · chapter mention

Go ahead and pull it up this uh map.

You'll see that Jesus' plan for his purpose is that he was going to use the Sea of Galilee and the surrounding regions to serve and minister to people.

And so the most efficient way to travel at that time was by boat.

So you'll see he crisscrosses the Sea of Galilee.

He'll go from Gentile regions to Jewish regions and back and forth and back and forth, which probably makes a lot of sense as to why the first four disciples that he engaged were what?

Fishermen.

They were fishermen.

They had boats, okay?

They had the resources that he needed, they had the skill sets that he needed to accomplish what he needed.

By the way, these are modern-day pictures of the Sea of Galilee.

It's about it's eight miles wide, 13 miles long, about 64 square miles, okay?

And so Jesus had to go back and forth in these regions.

He picks fishermen because they had boats and they would go back and forth.

Now, that at the time, in terms of human innovation and technology, that was the most efficient way to accomplish the plan.

But I want you to think for a moment.

When you really observe the text, in particularly the totality of everything we know about the gospels, I don't just want you to think about Jesus' plan and his efficiency.

I want you to think about what Jesus didn't do.

Okay, think about what he didn't do.

Yes, boats were the most efficient way for the average human to travel, but Jesus had at his disposal way more efficient options.

Okay, if all he cared about was efficiency and productivity, if that was his end game, max efficiency, max productivity, he could walk on water.

He didn't have to sit in the boat.

Okay, in fact, the next chapter in Mark chapter 6, watch this.

Mark 6 · chapter mention

Mark chapter 6, it says that night the discipline uh sorry, the disciples were in their boat in the middle of the lake.

Mark 6 · chapter mention

Now look at this.

Get this in your in your mind.

Picture it.

The disciples are have a head start.

They're halfway across the lake.

And Jesus was alone on the land.

They had, he had not even gone on in the water yet.

They're that far ahead.

And he saw they were in serious trouble, and so they started rowing hard and struggling against the wind and waves.

At 3 a.m., Jesus came toward them walking on water, and look at this.

And he intended to go past them.

If we're just talking speed, okay, distance over time, it's like, why would you get in a boat?

It's just like, hey guys.

Okay?

He could have jogged across, multitask, got a little exercise, could have totally gone way quicker.

Hey, let's just use our imagination.

Let's have fun.

Let's think of the options.

Let's put all the options on the table.

Jesus not only could have walked and gone way faster by himself on foot, but if Jesus could make Peter walk on water, imagine what he could have done with a horse.

Seriously.

No, let's just think of what's possible with Jesus.

If he can make Peter walk on water, he can certainly make a horse run on water.

And imagine you want to talk about proving your point.

You want to talk about making a scene.

You want to talk about making folks believe.

Imagine Jesus doesn't touch a boat.

He's just going across Galilee.

He gets off, get up, okay, get done, hop back on the horse, and go back.

And he's just crisscrossing the Sea of Galilee on a running water horse.

If all he wanted was efficiency and productivity, he could have been more efficient and more productive.

But he developed a healthy relationship.

Here's what you got to understand: efficiency, productivity.

These are tools, but they are not the end.

These are not your ethos.

They work for you, you don't work for them.

And that means that there are times that interruptions are appropriate, and you have to allow life to interrupt you.

You have to allow people to interrupt you.

There are some times that you got to put the app aside.

Now don't delete all your efficiency apps.

They're helpful.

It's a good tool.

Jesus had a plan.

I'm going to take the boat.

I'm not going to take the long way all the time.

But he also allowed himself to not be so emotionally connected to his plans that he saw interruptions as a problem or a bad day or the end of the world or I'm not doing a good job.

He expected it.

It seemed that he knew what C.S.

Lewis was talking about, about this being real life.

Keep looking at the text.

Look at it.

Look what Jesus doesn't do.

There's some head scratchers in here.

Okay, Jesus comes to the shore, Jairus comes down with the worst problem.

My daughter's about to die.

And when you think about that, if you know the gospels at all, think of it kind of reminds you of another story.

Do you remember the story of the centurion, the Roman centurion, who whose employee, his his servant, who's in close relationship, his friend is sick, and he comes to Jesus.

It's told in both Matthew and Luke.

He comes to Jesus, he's like, Jesus, my my my servant is sick.

I I know you can heal him.

Will you heal him?

And Jesus does something pretty provocative.

He goes, I'll come to your house.

Which was what was provocative about that is that he was a Gentile, Jesus was a Jew.

Jews did not go into the home of a Gentile, they did not do that.

And Jesus is like, I don't care, whatever.

Okay, he knew a new covenant was on its way, he was gonna think differently, he was bringing a whole new value system.

So here he comes in and he goes, I'll go to your house.

And the centurion, okay, he goes, You don't need to come to my house.

He's like, What?

He goes, if anybody knows it's me, he's like, I'm a centurion, I got a hundred people that work for me.

He goes, I don't have to show up to everything.

He goes, I just send my word.

I say, hey, Joe Centurion said, You guys need to do this, and they do it.

I send a messenger and it gets done.

And he goes, and you have way more authority than I do.

Just send your word and he'll be healed.

And Jesus went.

Are you all hearing this?

Is everybody you guys hearing this?

He goes, I haven't seen this kind of faith in all of Israel.

This is what's up with this Gentile, uh, uh centurion Roman.

This guy gets it, he goes, he has more faith than all of y'all.

I hope you guys are listening.

He goes, Congratulations, done, done.

Just go home.

Servants healed.

And he sends the miracle.

And he does it virtually, okay?

And it's done.

Well, gosh, why didn't he pull that out of his bag with Jairus' daughter?

Think about that.

I mean, Gyrus didn't ask for it, but come on, you gotta make me ask for everything.

I don't know what all the options are.

I didn't know what, you know, give me a menu or something.

Like, let me let me pick some stuff.

And Jesus goes and doesn't, for some reason, doesn't pull this miracle out, this option that he has, but yet he walks with, he journeys with Gyrus in that moment.

You gotta take some time with this.

You gotta look a little bit at the text, and you gotta think about think about what I mentioned earlier.

There's a crowd of people, a bunch of people that showed up on time, and he didn't help any of them.

He said no to them.

He had it in his power to heal all of them, to deal with their problems.

Jesus could have waved at them and fixed everything and moved on.

He's teaching us and why does he do it like this?

I think there's a couple reasons.

One, the first reason is we have to understand about Jesus was when he came to earth, his ministry on earth was bigger than just the day he lived in.

So it was yes, he did miracles and he healed people and he served his generation and all of this.

Like he did this, but you want to talk about not caring that much about efficiency.

Jesus didn't start his ministry until he was 30.

30.

So he had 30 years of preparation and working in things not related to his purpose.

And he only has a three-year ministry.

So you have to realize, like Jesus, yeah, he he healed people, and so much of what he did was giving us a glimpse at God.

So he says, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

In other words, if you watch Jesus with Jairus, to go to Jairus and go, hey, I care about what you care about.

Let's go see your daughter.

And then to be present with him, to walk with him.

He's giving us a view of God.

If Jesus was only trying to solve every problem of his contemporary day, he would have, you know, could have accomplished that, but it wasn't his ultimate work.

He was doing something transcendent.

He was doing something bigger than just the time period he happened to live in.

And so that means that it wasn't his number one top of his agenda plan to be as productive as possible and as efficient as possible.

The second thing was he was also modeling for us as humans how do we live with the constrictions and the boundaries of being a human being.

So, in other words, yes, Jesus could have ridden a horse across the water, but we can't.

So at some point, we do have to pick in our flesh what do we say yes to, what do we say no to?

We do have boundaries, we need boundaries, we do have limitations, you do run out of energy, you do run out of time.

And so Jesus is teaching, you gotta say no to some, you gotta say yes to some.

And he's modeling, he's modeling the willingness to deviate and to not be so passionate about your plan or even your vision that you can't allow yourself a sidetrack or or or an interruption that may be a divine interruption.

You know, Mark Batterson says, time is measured in minutes, but life is measured in moments.

Time is measured in minutes.

That's definitely how you'll find out if you're how productive and efficient you are.

But the depth of your life is in the moments, and the moments often come with a sidetrack.

Okay, so Greg, how do we do this?

How do I decide which things to take and which not to?

Well, Jesus in his supreme knowledge had the aptitude to know which sidetrack to take and which not to.

And I think although we don't necessarily have the full aptitude of Jesus, we do, we can't have the same attitude of Jesus, which I think we start there and go, you know what?

Interruptions are life.

Interruptions are life.

So I'm not gonna get frustration gap.

My expect I'm gonna set my expectation in that interruptions are life, and sometimes God himself even sends them to us.

And so I can't get flustered every time it happens or think that, okay, everything's come crashing down, or where is God, or why is this happening, and get angrier and angrier and try to get more efficient and more.

Sometimes you got to sort of realize what's happening, and emotionally, it helps you emotionally in your feelings to be able to accept the interruption for what it is.

And I think what we can do and what we should do is take the interruptions in a case-by-case basis.

So, yes, you do have to learn how to say no.

That's very important.

You gotta get good at that.

Sometimes people ask yourself, you gotta be like, nope.

You do have to run it through your systems and your process of deciding, okay, how do I make a decision of what I'm gonna say yes to and no to?

And so you may have really thought that out as logically as possible, but you do need to leave room in your mind and your heart for things that may ultimately be the right thing for you to engage with that might not fit into that.

It might not fit into that.

How do I know?

Well, I don't always know, no, but I can step back and pray and go, Lord, this is an interruption.

Something feels different about gyrus.

Something feels different about this woman with the issue of blood, something's coming out of me, something's drawing me to this.

Lord, is this something that you and pray about it?

Pray about it, Lord.

James 1, it says if if you lack wisdom, you can ask your generous God and He'll give it in real time.

Okay?

So so sometimes you gotta step back and go, hey, on paper, this interruption should be avoided.

On paper, this interruption should be ignored.

This is below my pay grade, or it's not in my realm of expertise, or it really seems like a big waste of resources, or whatever it might be.

It may appear to be that.

And it might be, and you might need to say no, or if you step back and pray, God might say, Go with gyrus.

Go with gyrus, stop with the woman with the issue of blood.

Jesus doesn't seem to be worried about the clock.

He seems certainly less worried than we do about running out of time.

But but to say, Lord, what do you what is you what are you asking of me?

What is mine to do in this situation and allow on a case-by-case basis the Lord to guide you?

The second thing is I want to talk about what do I do with interruptions that I cannot avoid.

Again, there are some of you today who have come in and there is a situation or a person, someone or something that's been presented in your life that you this is you're in it now.

You're in it now.

There's you can't you you can run, but you can't hide.

And you're in the gyrus type situation, you've been asked to deal with it.

What do you do with that?

I think the beauty of this narrative is exactly what gyrus does.

He goes right to the feet of Jesus, he bows before him, and he opens up his heart and he states his need.

Or my little daughter, I feel helpless.

I'm her dad, it's my job to help her.

She can't help herself.

She's on death's doorstep.

Lord, would you would you help?

And he goes to Jesus' feet.

And I think ultimately that's what we do with these interruptions.

We gotta bring them to God.

See, it's it's important to know you you can't interrupt God.

You can't interrupt God.

Jesus in his flesh had to deal with the limitations of flesh.

God is omniscient, omnipotent, he's everywhere.

God can handle, he can handle this, and and he will walk with you and journey with you.

But what you have to do is you have to embrace and get ready for a journey that's gonna have some twists and turns to it.

There are gonna be times that while dealing with your issue, the woman with the issue of blood shows up.

And there are times that you're looking at your watch and that you're feeling a sense of urgency and you're seeing God's patience, and you don't really prefer that.

And certain things don't make sense, and yet you're taking a journey.

Here's what I'm convinced, I'm convinced of if we were never interrupted, if we had no interruptions, we would probably be incredibly productive and super efficient, and the spreadsheet would look great.

It would look great.

You'd everything would be up and to the right.

Well, the wait, you guys are up and to the right.

It would all be up and to the right.

You would you you'd hit all the smart goals, and you'd 2x and 3x, and pretty soon you'd be talking about 10x, and maybe we gotta go 10x, maybe we gotta do this, and you'd just keep skipping levels, and you'd keep doing more, and you'd you you would accumulate respect and accolades and more resources and more trophies, and you'd have more to show for it.

You'd have a lot to show for it.

You might be the most productive, efficient person that you know and be celebrated in a sense.

And I think if that was the goal and that was the reality, that's what you would have.

But I'm equally convinced that it's in the interruptions that God takes us not necessarily faster, not necessarily further, but he takes us deeper.

There's something about being gyrous and looking at that little girl.

And there's something about rushing to the feet of Jesus, and there's something about Jesus' concern in his eye as he walks alongside you, and you go step by step with Jesus, and then you have moments of disappointment and you have this, but the story's not over, and things are still being written.

There's a there's a depth, there's a depth that takes place when there's an interruption you wouldn't have asked for, but you've been asked to deal with.

And if you'll go there and you'll take it to the feet of Jesus, and you'll bring your everything, your your fears, your concerns, your pain, all of it, all of it, your weakness, your strength, your all of it, you bring it to him.

You bring it to him, and you allow him to walk with you.

There is a depth that will be produced on your life.

It might not be fast and it might not be pretty, but it'll be a deepening journey.

And today, some of you have no choice.

What are you going to do with the interruption that's been introduced in your life?

You can't interrupt God.

He's standing there, he's waiting, he's receiving, he's ready to walk with you, to journey with you.

I encourage you today, bring him, bring it to his feet.

Bring it to his feet and take the journey.