Busy Signal

            Most of us are used to being busy, right? A fact of life is that many things are                                 engineered, it seems, specifically to interrupt our train of thought or slow down our                       response to someone else’s emergency in a long line of matters already on our To-Do list.             Right? 

To maximize our effort output, often we must juggle several things at once and always have a couple of crises simmering on the back burner, needing to be addressed before they erupt into open flames. Sound familiar? Often in self-defense, we tend to categorize calls on our time, 

So, we mentally list these occurrences according to our own judgment of priority. The risk is that a common result is that we tend to the urgent before the important. 

Often, we feel pressured when someone else’s emergency pops up, just as we made our plan for today. I know; you want to tell them to take a number, but crisis has to jump to the top of our list, right? 

Whether returning phone calls, or balancing our checkbook, if we don’t follow our schedule, those come with an implicit threat of complications if pushed aside for the urgent. But the interruption may be both urgent and important—investigate the circumstances, evaluate, and respond, postpone, or put your own agenda on hold and answer this new situation if warranted. 

Where is prayer’s place in this dilemma? We’re prayer warriors, right? What if an interruption comes while we’re praying? We’re certainly not irreverent enough to interrupt our time with the Lord. But what if the person on the phone is desperate—and what if they are praying too--for our help? Inasmuch as God gives us discernment, we must respond as God leads us—when we’re ready to resume that interrupted prayer, He won’t hang up He’ll be waiting. 

Even if all we can do to help that caller is to encourage him, calm him and go with him to God’s throne for grace, we have invested those few minutes with our God. We must guard against worshipping our routine instead of our God. 

At the same time, we must include in our day’s most important things  a scheduled time with Him—by prayer, reading His Book, worship, feeding His flock—remember we are Jesus’s  hands in this world. 

When that phone rings, we don’t want to put God on hold.