E.9: What to Do with God’s Interruptions
Get the Podcast Playbook, to accompany the podcast here. Filled with devotionals, checklists, questionnaires and more:
In this episode you will learn:
How to Hyperdrive your results, but not your life
The zany way that God got my attention
Powerful steps to re-design your life in an interruption
Episode length: 12:27
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What to Do with God’s Interruptions
Transcript:
Corona virus just took the world by storm. In my lifetime, I've never seen such a disruptive event to everything that we have known. It really made me stop and think, What do we do in life when hit with interruptions?
On today's podcast, we're going to shift gears and see how interruptions can really move us into hyper drive. As always, these are tips that you could start right now seek a move toward those God size dreams in bite sized chunks.
Hello and welcome to the podcast God size dreams in bite size chunks. I'm your host, Angela Meer. So let's get ready to be energized, inspired and activated in our God size dreams.
Hello and welcome to another episode. Coronavirus was really what many called the divine pause, or resets. It reminded me a lot of the Psalms when David would use the word Selah in his passages. This was a musical term that means to pause, stop and contemplate, and almost every one of us did. Family life took on new meaning, reading, and the Facebook memes had me rolling on the floor for hearty belly laughs.
But it was also very challenging. People lost their lives. Our security was threatened, our churches were closed. I'm an introvert. And even I found myself longing for more company than just my husband and two cats. What used to be a quick dash into the grocery store became lingering in the noodle just to hear the funny conversation between senior citizens in the next aisle. But I began to see God's interruptions other than tragic, frustrating or boring.
I began to see that my God tempo was changing and the slower pace was actually making me move into hyper drive.
How is that possible? You may think, Well, let me share with you a few ways that God's interruptions can actually cause your God dreams to suddenly materialize.
Challenging the Mundane
Number one. The mundane is challenged. You know, I talk about this a lot. Often times we need that kick out of the mundane and order to challenge us into something new. Corona virus was the biggest kick out of the mundane that I have ever seen. All of a sudden, a lot of parents all of a sudden became home schooling parents. Some people who worked in the medical field found themselves working massive amounts of hours just to keep up with everything that was going on. And really, we were challenged in the way that we did Health and the way that we handled our church lives were challenged in so many different things that have really become part of our status quo.
When the mundane is challenged, we often look for ways to think outside of the box. Thinking outside of the box is really a god way to move us into our gods size dreams. And often they will materialize because the mundane is challenged. So next time you're in a spot of divine interruption, really consider. What about that Divine interruption is causing you to be able to think differently about the problems you're being presented with?
Home Sweet Home
Real Needs
Number two: real needs are presented. Certainly this was the case with Corona virus there? Real needs that come to the to the table in the middle of a crisis like that. I was so proud of was that there was so many people on my Facebook feed during Corona virus who were sewing up a storm they were making face mask for people, and it was really awesome to see how many people were willing to come to the table and participate in this crisis in the way that they knew how. It reminded me of Rosie the Riveter from World War Two. Maybe you know the story of Rosie the Riveter, but she was a woman. She was really not a woman, but a model of the type of woman in World War Two who, instead of working in her kitchen, started to work in factories to make sure that the men who were being abroad who were fighting abroad, we're getting the things that they needed.
You know, when real needs are presented God size dreams come out of that. One of my friends who started making face mask it's still making face masks. Even afterwards, she's looking into creating a new type of face mask that's gonna be easier for nurses to wear. This is a god sized dream that suddenly materialized If Corona virus hadn't have happened. So taking these divine interruptions and looking at them through a different lens and recognizing the God’s wanting you to see where real needs are being presented, sometimes it takes a moment like a divine interruption, or like Corona virus, to really see that for what it is.
Podcast Playbook
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Creative Solutions are Required
Welcome back. Number three Creative solutions are required. So when divine interruptions hit us, we're required to think creatively. So, for instance, many of us really had to think, “What is a new way for me to do church for me? In my church, we began to meet house to house. There was quite a few gatherings going on. In fact, I would venture to say there was more gatherings going on than I've ever seen in my church before.
These creative solutions were causing small talk to happen with small groups of people, tiny groups of people that were getting together house to house and all of a sudden community was happening. God, tribes were being created. It was all positive stuff, as people were working through the frustration, fear and pain of Corona virus.
So creative solutions to problems that we've had in the past. Like, how do we get our people to hang out together? How do we build community? How did we let people learn about God tribes? Guess what… a creative solution was required in the middle of Corona virus and community in my church is stronger than ever. Perhaps it's in yours too.
Slow Down, Rabbit…
Number four slowing down helps us hear God for ourselves. I'm gonna be real honest. The first week of Corona Virus and the quarantine woah was I was emotional. I remember crying several days in a row and then sleeping several days in a row. But something happened in the midst of that, and I began to realize that I was producing a pace in my life that I wasn't proud of. It was a pace that caused me to not really hear my husband. It was a pace for me to not really concern myself with things that needed to be done around the house. It was a pace that was really exhausting to me. And once I realized that I was able to modify, I realized that I didn't want to come out of Corona virus without some new lessons in mind.
My husband and I began to meet Saturday nights together as family night. What we do is we make sure that we have a nice big meal on the table and we shut off all our electronics on Saturday nights now from 6 p.m To midnight. And what this allows us to do is have really good, solid conversations. We play board gams, we read, we invest in hobbies and guess what? I’ve even began starting to use Legos. Sounded like something fun. So now I play with Legos on Saturday nights, but what it does is it slows me down, and it keeps me invested in the things that are important to me.
Faith Builds
Number five. Our faith is grown. You see, in the Bible, faith is talked about a lot. But in real life, if we're providing ourselves safe and comfortable, existences our faith is not really challenged. When things come along like corona virus, our faith is challenged and we begin to ask ourselves:
Is my relationship with God going to rise up to this occasion? I bet for every one of you listening it did. Your faith was grown. You knew that God was coming through for you. And whether you had loved ones who were affected or you didn't. You knew that God was touching your life in a brand new way and your faith was growing.
As a result, Faith is such a powerful substance in the kingdom of God. Faith is this thing that enables us to have joy and peace in our life because faith takes all the worrying off the table. God's got this. And because God's got this, I can have joy today and I can have peace today. I don't need to worry about tomorrow. So your faith is grown during divine interruptions.
Changing Prayers = Changing Results
Number six Often times during divine interruptions our prayers change. So then our results change. He has ever heard that when you start to pray differently, you start to get different results. Well, I have and Corona virus really taught that to me that I needed to have different results by getting into different prayer lives. It really caused me to do that during Corona virus. I was quarantined for much longer than most people were because we're in a state that was hit first, that was it in Oregon. And so what I began to do is I began to have a prayer life that was kind of shifting from day today. Now in the past, my prayer life consists of pop up prayers and I pray in the spirit, and I also pray in just through my list.
But I began to pray in a very different way, and I prayed through a place of quietness. I would sit and I would quiet myself and I would hear what the Lord had to say. And once I heard what the Lord had to say, I would pray into what he was saying.
To me, this is a totally different way of approaching divine interruptions. It means that instead of knowing what we should be praying, we're literally saying to God, I don't know how to pray about this. So will you give you me insight where your holy spirit come and speak to me so that I can have an insight as to how to pray? That's one of the cool things happened for me in Corona virus, and I'm sure glad it did, because my prayer life is now resulting in a lot of different changes for me. I began to make shifts in my ministry, shifts in my business and shifts in the way that I do things. And that was all because I started praying in a totally different way. Sometimes just sitting down in quieting yourself in God's divine interruptions is the best thing we can do.
Do you want a prayer to pray during God's divine interruptions in your life? I know these times could be challenging, but having a prayer model can really helps it deeply into the interruption. So God can hyperdrive our God dream the prayers at the free podcast playbook, which includes devotionals, checklists, journal prompts and more at AngelaMeer.com. I'm praying for you as you process God's divine interruptions until next time. This is Angela Meer helping you achieve God size dreams in bite size chunks.