The Sacrament of the Present Moment (Part IV): Receiving the Interruptions of God
- 2 days ago
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One of the deepest lessons Jean-Pierre de Caussade teaches is that the present moment rarely arrives in the form we expected.
We make our plans.
We set our order.
We know what the day should look like.
And then God allows something else.
A delay.A phone call.A disappointment.A person in need.A closed door.A sudden burden.A change of direction we did not ask for.
Our first instinct is often resistance.
We say, This is getting in the way of what I was supposed to do.
But Caussade gently turns us around and says: this interruption may itself be the will of God.
That is the heart of the sacrament of the present moment.
Not merely enduring what comes, but receiving it from the Father’s hand.
The Christian life is not lived only in planned devotions, chosen duties, and quiet hours of prayer
It is also lived in the unplanned moment—the knock at the door, the child’s question, the changed appointment, the weariness we did not expect, the task that arrives from outside our own design.
These moments reveal what is really in us.
Do we love God only in the schedule we arranged?
Or do we love Him enough to meet Him in the schedule He arranged?
This is where surrender becomes real.
Anyone can speak of trust in broad terms. But when the day turns, when the plan breaks, when someone else’s need replaces our own intention, we are invited into a deeper obedience.
The interruption becomes an altar.
The changed plan becomes prayer.
The unwelcome moment becomes holy ground.
This is not passivity. It is not carelessness. It is not an excuse for disorder.
Rather, it is the steady recognition that God is never absent from the actual moment in which we find ourselves.
Jesus Himself lived this way.
Again and again in the Gospels, He was “interrupted.”
Jairus came while He was teaching. The woman touched His garment while He was on the way.
Blind Bartimaeus cried out from the roadside.Children were brought when the disciples thought the timing was wrong.
Yet none of these were interruptions to the Father’s will.
They were the will of the Father.
So it is with us.
Some of the holiest work we will ever do is not what we wrote in the planner, but what grace places in front of us at 11:17 in the morning.
The sacrament is not hidden in the ideal day.
It is hidden in this day.
And if we receive it in faith, even the broken edges of life begin to shine with providence.
Tomorrow’s holiness is not ours yet. Yesterday is gone.
But this moment—this very one—is full of God.
Lord, teach us to welcome what You send, not merely what we choose.Help us meet You in every interruption, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
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Oft-times the path grows dim and dreary,
The darkness hides the cheering ray,
Still I will trust tho’ worn and weary,
My Savior leads, He knows the way.
He knows the evils that surround me,
The turnings that would lead astray,
No foes of night can ere confound me,
For Jesus leads, He knows the way.
O heart weighed down with nameless anguish,
O guilty soul torn with dismay,
Thine ev’ry foe, His pow’r will vanquish,
Let Jesus lead, He knows the way.
A.H. Ackley, 1913
But he knoweth the way that I take: when
he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. Job 23:10
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