I Am Interrupting Something More Important

She apologizes for arriving. Every time. To everybody.

Sorry, is this a bad moment. Sorry, I know you are busy. Sorry to bother you. I will not keep you.

She has said some version of that sentence, out loud, to another human being, probably fifteen thousand times, and she is forty-four.

And she does it with God too, which is the part I actually want to talk about.

Her prayers open with an apology. Not for sin, which would be one thing. For the intrusion. For taking up the time. For being one more thing on a very long list held by Someone with a great deal going on.

She has a picture in her head that she has never once examined, and in the picture He is in the middle of something. Something enormous and urgent, wars and famines and the actual suffering of the actual world, and she is standing at the edge of it with her small thing, waiting for a gap.

There is never a gap. She has been waiting for a gap for twenty years.

So her small thing goes unsaid, and she leaves before she has really arrived, and she calls it not wanting to be a burden.

So let me ask you.

What have you decided matters more than your arriving?

He was interrupted and He was not annoyed

There is a scene I need you to look at closely, and the thing to watch is not Him. It is the people standing between.

Parents are bringing children to Him. Babies, the text says. And the disciples turn them back.

And I want to be fair to those men, because they were not being cruel. They believed they were protecting something. There was teaching happening, serious teaching, and here came a crowd of families with small children in the middle of it, and somebody decided that this was not what the day was for.

They were wrong, and He said so.

But Jesus called the children to him and said, Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.Luke 18:16

He overrules them out loud, in front of everybody, and He does it without softening it.

Luke 18 has Him rebuking the people who were filtering His door on His behalf, and the Spirit put that correction in the record for everybody who ever came after, so the arithmetic that ranks your arrival below something more important has never once been His. You are not ranked below anything He is doing.

Now, plain and warm, because this is you and I know it is you.

You have become your own disciple at the door. Nobody else is turning you back. There is no gatekeeper. You have taken the job on yourself, out of what you honestly believe is consideration, and you have been doing it so long that the apology comes out before the sentence does.

And notice what the disciples were protecting. Something genuinely important. That is what makes this hard. They were not weighing children against nothing, they were weighing children against real teaching on a real day.

He still said do not hinder them.

Luke 18 has Him choosing the interruption over the important thing while the important thing was still going on, and the Spirit recorded that ranking deliberately, which means twenty years of waiting for a gap has been waiting for a permission He already gave loudly. You have it, and you have had it the whole time.

And read the last clause, because it is the one that undoes the whole picture in your head.

The kingdom belongs to such as these. Not is tolerated by. Belongs to.

Luke 18 does not say He made room for the children, it says the kingdom is theirs, and the Spirit was in that word, so the small thing you carry has never been at the edge of what He is doing. You are in the middle of it.