Nobody Refuses These Moments. They Just Never See Them.

You know what your day is supposed to contain before it starts.

There is a list; the list has an order, and by the time you sit down with your coffee, you have assigned a time frame to each thing on it.

Then the day begins arguing with you.

Planning is not the problem. A woman who runs her week with some intention gets more out of it than a woman who lets the week run her.

But a plan held too tightly changes what you are able to see.

You move through the grocery store, the office, or the church parking lot with your eyes on the next thing, and you miss the person standing in front of you who needed thirty seconds and did not get them.

Scripture returns to this again and again, through a pattern in the life of Christ that is easy to read past.

He was interrupted constantly, and he almost never seemed to mind.

In Luke 8, he is on his way to the house of Jairus, whose daughter is dying. There is a crowd pressing in, a father in agony, and a clock. A woman who has been bleeding for twelve years reaches out and touches the edge of his cloak, and he stops the entire procession to find out who it was.

He is not efficient about it. He asks. He waits. He speaks with her and calls her daughter, and only then continues to the house, where a messenger has already come to say the girl has passed.

She is raised, anyway.

In John 4, he is traveling to Galilee, and he sits down at a well in the heat of the day to talk with one Samaritan woman whom he easily could have passed by.

In Mark 6, he and the disciples are worn out and looking for a quiet place to rest. The crowd follows them there. He teaches them, and then he feeds five thousand of them, and the rest he went looking for never comes.

The parable of the Good Samaritan works the same ground from the other direction. We read it as a story about compassion, which it is, but it is also a story about scheduling. A priest and a Levite each had somewhere to be, and a man bleeding in the road was not on the itinerary. The Samaritan rearranged his day, spent his own money to help him, and took him to receive care on his own accord.

Being interruptible does not mean being available to everything.

It does not mean that anyone with your phone number gets to take whatever they want from your afternoon. There is a counterfeit version of this that looks like holiness and is really an inability to say no, and it produces a woman who is depleted, quietly resentful, and not much use to the people she keeps saying yes to.

Christ withdrew often. He went up the mountain alone. He got into a boat to get away from crowds. He slept through a storm while everyone around him panicked.

Whatever being interruptible meant for him, it did not mean having no center.

It also does not mean being unreliable. You can keep your word about when you will arrive and still let the ten minutes before you leave belong to whoever needs them. Promptness and interruptibility are not enemies. Both of them are ways of taking other people seriously.

The difference is where your attention sits.

What made those moments above matter is that someone was in front of him, he saw them, and he let it count for something.

That is the discipline. Not saying yes to everything, but keeping your eyes open enough to notice when something is being asked of you.

Most of us never refuse these moments.

We simply never see them, because we are looking at a list.

Hebrews says it plainly: do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for some have entertained angels without knowing it. The reference is to Abraham in Genesis 18, sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day when three men appear. He runs to meet them. He has a meal prepared. He gives up his entire afternoon for travelers he does not recognize, and the visit changes the course of his life.

He did not know who they were. That is the point.

You may not know either.

So leave margin in the week. A day with no slack in it cannot absorb anyone else’s need without breaking, so build the week so that being stopped costs you something you can afford to lose.

Then look up.

Cultivate what lasts.