I still remember sitting in my Intro to Ministry class one day my sophomore year and hearing my professor, Dr. Holleyman, talk about his experience in ministry. Each of my fellow classmates and I were hanging on his every word. He always had such a way of keeping things light and fun while offering great wisdom and insight. So, it doesn’t surprise me that when he discussed how, “the interruptions are the ministry,” that this phrase has stuck with me even three years later.
Sometimes my mind leans a little too far toward order and schedules and sticking to a plan. If you can give me some specific instructions, I can promise to work hard and follow through with a perfectionistic attitude most of the time. However, when it comes to ministry, God continues to open my mind and change my heart to see that messy is often so much better.
On the World Race, we often joke about how quickly plans can change and just how frequently we’ve learned to expect the unexpected. Even though I’ve come to anticipate all this as normal, I still like to etch out my own little routine in my mind, and this month has been no different. We’ve been traveling to different villages in southeast India, visiting centers for children that provide a safe space for them to go after school and receive any help they might need. This is a wonderful program, emphasizing the importance of education for children, and the organization recruits sponsors from across the world to pay for the school fees of these children and therefore prevent them from falling back into poverty, like much of their family before them.
As we have been visiting these villages, our schedules have sometimes changed, and for the first two we visited, we were mostly following the direction of the pastor with whom we were staying. At the second village of the month, we had started to plan out the days ahead, with our mornings set aside mostly for team time and individual quiet time with the Lord. However, one morning, I was in for quite the surprise. As I settled in to read Isaiah on the front porch of the pastor’s house, a woman from the village walked up the path with a purpose grabbed my arm and started miming. As I’ve come to know and love, we both tried our hardest to understand each other through the language barrier before I called out a pleading cry to our sweet and wonderful translator, Mounibab. She popped out of the house with a smile on her face, like usual, and after a quick conversation with the woman, she communicated to me that she wanted me to come to her house.
Honesty time: I didn’t really want to go. As mentioned before, I had just snuggled in to have some quiet time, AND we had just just returned from another woman’s house. What do these people want from us?! Just kidding, I hadn’t quite gone into diva mode, but I may have been close.
However, I waltzed in to the house, communicated the news to my team, and recruited two of them to come along with me. We told our translator that she could stay and rest, because we figured we would be gone only about 10 minutes. We walked just down the road to the woman’s house where we were immediately greeted and given chairs on her front porch. Before we knew it, candies were handed to us, then bananas, then grapes, and shortly after, chai. If you didn’t know, Indian people are unbelievably hospitable, and basically I’ve been forced to eat my weight in chapati and rice so far this month. (Just suffering for the Lord, ya know?)
My two teammates and I were particularly perpetually full in this village, but we couldn’t help but take what this woman and all her neighbors were offering, with smiles on our faces. (Right after we arrived, we were surrounded by about 20 people.) Before we knew it though, we were laughing, holding babies (one four month old who we actually were asked to give an English name the day before— God gave me Peter for him), and getting our hair braided with flowers. Suddenly, it was about an hour later.
Even if I was hesitant to go with this woman to begin with, really desiring time to myself instead, God used this time of broken communication, laughter, food, and overtly kind people to refresh me anyway.
I’m so glad the Lord gives us free will. He allows us to choose what path to take so often. And then sometimes we fill our schedules just a little too much, and an interruption comes along out of the blue. We then have two choices to make— ignore the interruption or choose to make ministry out of that interruption. Quite often the Holy Spirit has orchestrated these interruptions and therefore prompts us toward the second, for our better. God could have done great things for me in that quiet time that morning (that I actually had time for later in the day too), but instead He had something better in store. By choosing to respond to the interruption, it was a reminder of the little joys in life, and how they actually add up to make the big picture in my ministry this year. Even though I may have a picture in my head of how something is “supposed” to go most of the time, God is reminding me over and over of the beauty in the unplanned and the interruptions that come along. In those interruptions, we have the opportunity to really let the Holy Spirit take over. When we may think the situation is at its messiest, that is really when our Savior steps in and makes the most magic. That’s what happened that day, and I hope it keeps happening many days to come.
“In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.” Proverbs 16:9
