“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks. . . . It is a strange fact that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God’s “crooked yet straight path.”
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer Life Together,
When I first heard these words read in our last gathering, my immediate reaction was “Wait, stop. Can you please read that again?” And when I went back to read it for myself, all of the other words on the page blurred and I would have to blink, shake my head and read it over again.
It had a jarring effect on my thinking. It forced me to ask myself; What are the “important tasks, plans or work”, that I may be so busy carrying out that I‘m way out on Route 35 cruising along in the fast lane and completely missed the East exit to the road God had marked out?
I began to think of all of my agendas, especially the ones where I sincerely believed that I was “doing God’s work.” It was like mission with an outcome; if I do A and B, then C will happen. I also began to see the things in my life that I wasn’t too keen on having interrupted, because in my eyes, they were working, or were a “good thing”.
It reminded me of a study I recently heard of that was done at Princeton University in the early 1970’s. Two behavioral scientists who were studying the psychology of prosocial behavior, wanted to examine Why people do good things for others?
They conducted their study among the Theological Seminary Students. The participants were each instructed to prepare a brief talk about the Good Samaritan from the Bible. As many of us are aware, this is a story of how a wounded and beaten traveler lying on the side of the road was negligently avoided by three holy men.
The students were then told to walk to a nearby building to give their sermon. Some were given plenty of time to get there and some were put under a time constraint. Yet to get to the building, the students had to walk through an alley way in which a fellow participant was disguised as a sick man in need of help. Now, the alley way was narrow, only four feet across, so in order not to help this man, a person would have to step over him.
The results of the study are both shocking and ironic; only 40% of the students actually stopped to help the stranger.
However, these were theology students, who you would expect to have Christian social morals and obligations, and they had been studying the Good Samaritan for the last few days!
This study proves how often we are so preoccupied with our own agendas, even with the perceived sincerity of carrying out “God’s work” that we may be missing God altogether; His Spirit drowned out by the cacophony of our own noise. I am not proposing that we stop everything we are doing and resort to doing nothing at all, but I have definitely been reevaluating how much time I spend actually listening to God with a quiet heart. This quiet listening has drawn me closer into the light of “being” rather than the frenzy of doing. It’s allowed me to give over my carefully marked out calendar to God and practice presence and faith in each moment life presents.
