When I found out I would be team leading the last three months of the race, I remember my first prayer was, “Lord, please oh please don’t let any of my teammates get sick these next few months. I don’t want any of us to have to go to the hospital.” And then our second night as a team in Peru came around and guess what? Yup, you guessed it. We made our first hospital visit. Long story short, one of my teammates cut these really hot Peruvian peppers that had been mislabeled at the supermarket and caused her hands to painfully burn for hours. So much so that after three painkillers, two IV’s, and hours later, she was still in pain! We entered at 10 p.m. and didn’t end up leaving until about 2 a.m. The whole time I went back and forth from the ER to the front desk to get more and more medication. “It’s a rare case, the doctor said, “usually people don’t have such a strong reaction to these peppers.” None of it made sense. I started getting anxious after seeing her in so much pain and having none of the meds work. “Lord, I don’t get it?” He then answered me with one of the strangest responses he’d ever given me, “Learn to be interruptible.”
There’s a quote I read once that said, “don’t be so busy that you can’t be interrupted, sometimes our most important meetings are those we didn’t plan.” I began to think about all the people in the Bible the Lord interrupted and what He taught them. Like Moses whom the Lord appeared to through a burning bush. The Lord literally interrupted his plans. A man who had been hiding in a desert after murdering a man. Or how about David? A shepherd boy the Lord used Saul to interrupt in the middle of flocking to anoint him as king. Or one of my favorites, Elijah. A prophet who like Moses had been hiding after having killed many other prophets. The Lord literally asked him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Then he asked him to go back the way he had come and send him to anoint three men.
There are so many other examples of people the Lord interrupted in the Bible. Some were in hiding after having sinned and some were just living their lives and going about their work. All these men had something in common, they were interruptible, but what does that even mean? It means to allow yourself to be available and flexible in any given situation. It also means to be obedient to the voice of the Lord no matter how scary or absurd his request may be.
Think about this for a minute. What would have happened if Moses would have refused to free the israelites or David had rejected his position as king? History would have completely changed. It would have not only affected the people in those times, but eventually us as well.
So I want to challenge you today to be interruptible. Maybe the Lord is calling you out of a place of darkness the way he did with Moses and Elijah. Maybe he’s calling you forth into a position you feel unready to take like David. Or maybe he wants you to deliver a message to someone or a group of people that maybe hard to say, like Jonah. Whatever it may be, walk in obedience, you never know how your decision may affect not only you, but generations after you! It may be scary, but I promise it will be worth it. Shannon, a friend of mine, and former teammate once said to me, “the very reason you say you can’t do something should be the very reason you should do it.”
So ask yourself, what is the Lord asking me to do today?
Whatever it is, don’t make excuses, He wants to use you to do mighty things that no one else can do!
