On Disruption

Disruption is likely a word that registers negatively to most of us. If I’m honest, even as my affection for the word and the concept has grown over time, my tolerance of it, in reality, is still low.

My wife and I raise a toddler - our sleep is often disrupted. Disrupted sleep disrupts the day. This morning, where we usually try to get up around 7-7:30am, we woke up at 9am - because originally we had woken up at 4am and didn’t get back to sleep until 6am. Being that I’m usually downstairs to start my work for the morning at 9am… Well, you get it.

My previous week was disrupted - I hit a major wall with writing that, in retrospect, was due to happen, and I’m now publishing this blog 2 weeks late by what I hoped and agreed to accomplish. Thankfully at this moment, I’m my own boss and I don’t have a deadline for writing, so I can slide by, but who knows what the future holds, and I want to stay disciplined. Building and cementing our disciplines is crucial to anything we do vocationally.

But how should we react to disruptions?

I think it’s best to start with considering whether we can control disruptions or not, and also, how problematic they actually are.

Disruptions We Cannot Control

Disruptions happen. In fact, they probably happen every day for most of us. Unless you got the perfect night’s sleep and you’re willingly reading this five minutes after waking, chances are you’ve encountered one or more so far in your day.

And that’s not to blow it out of proportion, because small disruptions aren’t the biggest hang-up. Waking up 15 minutes before your alarm, leaving you with a “paltry” 7 hours and 45 minutes of sleep is likely not breaking the deal for you.

It’s the larger disruptions that fracture our day. Our week. Our month. Our year or more.

It’s when something suddenly shifts with your health - maybe a major and disparate diagnosis “stops” life, or perhaps something that will affect how we live going forward and needs to be accounted for.

It’s when something around your job shifts - maybe the market forces you to be laid off or have to quit, maybe your plan for your career has to adjust or fall off… Something happens that affects your livelihood and your ambitions.

And though I believe that the two categories of life factors I just listed are as precious to God as things we consider more “religious”, there’s also the things we consider more sacred.

It’s when our connection with God seems strained and uninteresting. What has classically worked to connect with the One who holds our souls goes dry - and perhaps it was that way to begin with and we didn’t do anything about it. Perhaps we even grow tired of just throwing Romans 8:28, amongst other common scriptures, at our situation as though they’re mystical incantations in an attempt to wave off the woes.

And how about our faith in God’s sovereignty? God’s ability to affect and right our circumstances? Maybe we even wonder if God cares about what we’re going through or even willed our suffering?

Major disruptions put pressure on our faith and show us, when struck against, how it holds up - or rather, how it holds us up. 

Please don’t receive that as condemnation - I’ve heard too much talk of how our lack of faith or our doubts are something we need to be ashamed of. I don’t think God is looking at it like that. I think there’s much compassion from God on such matters. We mime bits out of the Psalms about God being our fortress or covering us under God’s mighty wings, but end up pained by that not being enough to right our being - which is good, because God agrees. God wants us to have life abundant and God as our unshakeable foundation1 because God WANTS that for humanity - God is sorrowed for us when we don’t have that. And, God is sorrowed when our circumstances are negatively disrupted in ways we couldn’t account for or have seen coming.

We will all likely have a major disruption occur in our lives, and most of us will have many. That’s how it is this side of Eden and that side of eternity. 

Disruptions Within Our Control

Coming back from where we started, some of you are probably thinking, “Control disruptions? Sir, that’s not how disruptions work. They just happen to you. I sure wasn’t looking to wake up to whatever nonsense I did this morning.”

Others of you might be thinking “Ugh, yeah… I need to get my crap together. I could’ve done this better, and should have thought more about that.”

It’s true, disruptions are classically seen by most as an issue. Webster’s defines the word as such:

“The act or process of disrupting something : a break or interruption in the normal course or continuation of some activity, process, etc.”

The definition attached shows that negative association, but are also good examples of a differing opinion for our ability to control them.

Take sleep for example.

Maybe your toddler wakes up at 4am and decides that they need you (I’m just, supposing that happens…). Or maybe your neighbor's dog goes ballistic while exercising good digestive health. We probably all have an example to throw under this one.

But maybe you stayed up too late doom scrolling on your phone. Maybe you ate a questionable burrito at a questionable hour close to bedtime. Again, I think we’re probably all in the same boat here if we stop to recollect.

Some disruptions we encounter in our life are within our ability to influence, if not prevent.

The easy example from Webster's definition is “disruptions in service.” Again, it COULD be out of your control - a stray lighting strike toasting the local power transformer, knocking your electricity out for a couple of days? Yeah, that’s out of your hands. But, if you forgot to pay your electricity bill or couldn’t because you made some questionable purchases? You were the cause of disruption.

When disruption occurs, it’s an opportunity to gently assess whether we had a hand in it.

Maybe things aren’t where they should be with God because we haven’t set the table right. We’ve put our time to intentionally connect with God into a timeslot where we aren’t our best selves. Maybe we’re engaging with prayer, scripture or other practices that aren’t helpful and we haven’t tried anything different.

And that’s not saying that either of these are necessarily willingful negligence. Maybe our life and schedule ARE that crazy. Maybe we don’t know we can connect with God at different times of the day or in different ways that run WITH the grain of who we are. They are, however, things that we do have control over. They are disruptions that affect our connection with God, and as a result, other things in our lives.

I think that we should try to avoid overthinking on whether we are culpable for the disruptions - not that we shouldn’t, because part of wisdom is assessing how we handle the controllables. But, the key is that we prayerfully and wisely assess how we can control what we can, leaving the rest in the hands of God.

So let me guess, you’re saying disruptions are good.

Ah, glad to see you’re tracking, but… Yes, and no.

Let’s get the “no” out of the way first.

Disruptions are often the result of something gone awry. An unexpected and detrimental illness, your marriage suddenly falling apart, a financial hit that came out of nowhere… The examples go on. Anyone that comes and tries to tell you that those things by their nature are blessings - well, you’ll likely have a hard time thanking them for that sentiment.

If we want to wane theological for a moment, sin is THE biggest disruption. God intended things to be a certain way, and however the breakdown of that went down, it pushed things downhill. Union - our connection with God and, as a result, with neighbor, creation and ourselves - was fractured. Sin is a way of doing things that disrupts that union, and with it, proper relationship to everything.

And though it’s a bit of an aside, I like to try and convey that we should put sin and how that has affected everything into one category: brokenness.

Sin tends to flow out of how we were broken. We break other things, intentionally or not, because we are broken. The God I see depicted in The Bible is trying to restore all things, which, yes, does mean eradicating sin, but that’s because God is good and loves well. God’s desire for us not to sin - or, again, to tie it back, be bamboozled into disrupting the way things were meant to be - is a compassionate move. God isn’t some ticked off parent who’s mad at the kids because they’re doing it wrong - God is a good parent who wants wholeness for everything, because that means wholeness for God’s children.

So what does a good cosmic parent do to respond to the disruption of brokenness? Many things, really, but one of those things is to turn that disruption on its head - to make the nonsense make sense.

God didn’t will your health to fall apart, but God does will that in the midst of it, you’ll feel greater closeness and a new, more intimate way of relating to God. God’s intention wasn’t that your marriage fall apart, but God intends to use that tragedy to cast off the ego and false self so that you are more restored to yourself and to God. God is more hurt than you are for your financial issues that keep you from getting what you need to be secure in this world, but God will use it to bring a new security that you were meant to have in the first place.

So can we control disruptions? Sometimes, yes, but so often, no. Brokenness is part and parcel until Christ returns and then isn’t. For now, God is taking our disruptions and turning them into restoration - into salvation and the setting right of things. As we’ve covered, we tend to see disruptions as a bug (which, it would seem, they are), but God works within our circumstances to make them work out like they were a feature. A necessary step to the end result. 

And so it’s for us to be good stewards of disruptions.

On the disruptions we have some control and sway over, it’s for us to stop, gently notice, receive God’s forgiveness that we who are in Christ already have, and choose what seems to be the correct way - that old divisive chestnut called repentance.

And the disruptions we can’t control? Stop. Pray. Know that God is sad for what you’re experiencing. Review God’s track record for disruption - in your life and in others. Be patient - some disruptions take minutes to get our footing back from, others require big stretches of time. Stay close to people who faithfully image Christ to you - in person or on pages (or podcasts and audiobooks, if you prefer). However it works for you as you slow things down and notice what helps. But above all, be expectant of God’s faithful response to things. It might not look how you want or think it (though, maybe it will), but God doesn’t leave us hanging when the ground gives way.

While that all seems like suggestions for how to react to disruption, I think it’s more about how we relate to disruptions.

Reacting says “I need to shift my posture when this happens”. And that can be a bit of an anxious and breakneck affair. Relating expects the shift, and the reactions flow naturally out of the expectation.

Reacting seeks to make peace with the circumstances, but relating is at peace with them.

Reacting causes us to attempt to reestablish balance when our soul’s footing is disturbed, but relating is so in sway with it all that it keeps posture with less or no effort. 

Henri Nouwen says it like this:

“Whereas in the past the anguish seemed quite disruptive and often paralyzing, now I experience it a little more as a severe companion who wants to show me the narrow road. Once I have found that road and walk safely on it, the anguish might leave me, but right now I am trying simply to accept what the Lord gives me and trust that He knows when, how and where to give me new peace and new joy.”2

All to say, we have to react well before we can relate well. I’m not there yet. God is getting me there, but I still react to disruptions all the time. Especially with things that have ties to trauma or an ingrained methodology for survival that I received as a child and have yet to shake off - those things are hard. I think we all can relate to that, how something inside of us goes off and there was no compensatory window to prevent it. But if God is compassionate and wants us to heal, then fear and shame aren’t held against us, and, as a result, are not welcomed to our reaction. God wants to bring us home to who we were meant to be - who we are without the trauma, the brokenness, the bad set of survival tactics.

To quote someone else, JS Park puts it in a refreshing way:

“I consider how grace can disrupt a seemingly inevitable story of old wounds so that our injuries do not become portals to pass on pain, but to pass on the most whole parts of ourselves instead.”3

To close

Disruptions - controllable or not - don’t have the last word. As Paul might put it, “Disruptive death, where is your sting?” Which is not to say it doesn’t sting when we’re in it - it does. Like all brokenness, it’s both still a pain and a factor while also being something that is swallowed up by the work of the cross. Salvation arrived as an event that we answered the call to, so that the ongoing process of salvation can heal us and as a result, everything around us through us, as we wait for salvation to come to fullness when Christ returns.

That’s the image - expectancy within the disruption for the now and the later while we wait for the disruption - controllable or not - to be edged out in full.

Until then, be held. 

Be kind to yourself as God is kind to you. 

Be brought back to your feet. 

Be restored. 

Repeat and repeat as the recovery window of that process whittles down over time.

May the God who is working all disruptions to the good of God’s beloved feel near to you amidst the righting of the wrongs.

1 24 “Everyone, then, who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!” 

New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021), Mt 7:24–27.

2 Nouwen, Henri J. M., et al. Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life. Franciscan Media, 2016.

3 Park, JS. As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve. Thomas Nelson, 2024.