Interruptions Are Part of the Adventure
people make life complicated...and wonderful
Hello! This month we’ve been aiming to grow in purpose and productivity.
But it sure is hard to be “purposeful and productive” if you’re in the first trimester of pregnancy and feel like you’ve been injected with horse tranquilizer, isn’t it? Or if your refrigerator broke at a really inconvenient time, or if Covid hit your family right when you felt like you were hitting your stride. Sometimes it feels like the machine of your life has so many malfunctioning pieces that you have no choice but to break down.
C.S. Lewis wrote this in a letter to a friend: “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.”
We tend to have the attitude of “how dare you?” when unwanted circumstances come into our lives. But if we have this deep-rooted belief that we’re the kings of the world and everything needs to bow to our plans, we will never be able to be happy or do anything meaningful because we’ll be too busy railing against all the things that get in our way.
Check out this proverb: “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.”1 It’s easier to maintain an empty barn, but…what’s the point? Easier doesn’t mean better.
If you didn’t have kids or other people in your life, it would be a lot easier to have a consistently clean house. You wouldn’t have to deal with as many annoying habits, or cancel as many plans, or wake as many times in the night. Sometimes you might miss your old life when there weren’t quite so many moving pieces that have the potential to mess up your day.
But wouldn’t you rather have a dirty barn than one without any animals to plow your field? Isn’t a tired, fruitful life much preferred to an easy, empty one? The choice to love other people is uncomfortable and sometimes grueling—and maybe your “yes” was something you fell into more than something you chose—but it’s an adventure. Would you dare to see it that way?
As Bilbo naïvely said at the beginning of his journey in The Hobbit, “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them."
But oh, how he changed by the end of it. And oh, how we’re changing through this journey that we’re on. Embrace the journey, dear friends, and may you see that interruptions are part of the adventure.
I hope this encourages you. Feel free to comment about a time when you felt inconvenienced by an interruption in life until you found a lot of meaning and beauty in it. And I’m sending hugs to the many of you who are in the thick of a hard time that feels pointlessly hard. ❤️
Warmly,
Hope from Family Scripts
Proverbs 14:4, ESV
I love your perspective. As I try to get manuscripts finished and fine tuned it’s very easy to let the interruptions annoy me. But it’s often these very interruptions that provide me with endless story ideas.
Yes, thank you! Last night was a hard one and I sat up one point in the dark wondering how I'd get through the day having been woken up so many times with my sick little. This changed my perspective.