Submitted by Todd Murphy
"Knock, knock," says the door.
"Who is it?" I ask.
"It's me," says a precious little voice. "Can I come in?"
"Sure, come on in little buddy!" I say as my grinning four year old bursts through the door, slamming the knob against my desk. He is sporting a Nerf Jolt pistol and two lethal foam darts.
"I came up to shoot you," he grins as he plants his feet wide apart, stationing himself for his assault. Holding the gun under his arm he wrenches the cocking leaver down and then carefully inserts the bolt. "Ready?" he asks. Having learned my lesson, I cover my eyes so that I do not lose one or at least walk around for the rest of the day looking like I have an acute case of pink-eye. "Pop!" he shoots me in the knee. Over the next five minutes I endure the onslaught of multiple point-blank shots to the legs and chest, with a beaming grin as he relishes in Nerf-bludgeoning his helpless prey into oblivion.
I have to say my little guy sometimes wreaks havoc on my productivity flow, but I would not trade these blessed interruptions for the world. He will be this age one time and so now is the time to enjoy it. The beauty of it is that even if I am working, he knows he is welcome. It is not because I don't have anything important to do, but because I do not have anything more important than him, and at the end of the day, he knows that I have a really, really big soft-spot for him.
As Christians we need to be reminded that God has just such a soft spot for us. He loves it when we take time to interrupt His day. It is a blessed interruption for Him too. I think sometimes we are a bit to serious and somber about the whole thing. Have we ever thought of our prayer time as a time to play with God? Really, what is play? Who do we play with? We do it with people we love; we do it because we enjoy their company.
In the early Church it was customary for the Church to teach new Christians to take time to pray the Lord's Prayer three times daily (see the Didache, section 8). Discipleship meant creating new rhythms of life, to conform our time to God's. The reason for praying the Lord's Prayer three times daily was meant to correspond to the tree meals humans ate per day. When Jesus taught us to pray give us this day our daily bread, it had its literal side. But it did not stop there. It also had within it that bigger theological truth, that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
All throughout my day I am often encountered by these blessed interruptions from my little guys. Sometimes it is my two year old, sometimes my 4 year old or 11, 13, 15, 16 year old (or even my dear wife). Sometimes it is hard to get anything done! Any way you look at it, no matter how often it happens, there is something I just love about it. Is that how you see our heavenly Father? Or perhaps do you see Him as a grumpy old man who does not want to be interrupted like the Wizard of Oz. In John 17 Jesus exemplifies both prayer and how to approach the heavenly Father in prayer - boldly with confident assurance that He has time for us. For our relationship with God to grow, we need to take initiative to make our own blessed interruptions in our own life. Maybe we need to interrupt our sleep a little early to pray. Perhaps we need to take our lunch to feed our soul as well as our flesh, or maybe sometimes in place of our flesh. Maybe we need to sacrifice that TV show to pray with our family or take a prayer walk. Let's take time to interrupt our day and relish in the presence of God.
