When I think about interruptions in my life, I think about the first five years of my marriage. It all began with our honeymoon and finding out at the airport that my brand-new husband's passport had expired. I remember sitting on my suitcase, looking out at the tarmac, thinking, “This is what life is going to be like being married to Ben Weber.” I was not entirely wrong. I could talk about our first ski trip and how after driving through the Rocky Mountains in a snowstorm at 2 am did not deter Ben from waking up at 7 am to hit the slopes, which ended up with me on top of a mountain crying into my fogged-up ski goggles asking if I can walk down the mountain instead of ski. Or I could talk about our trip to Canada with our 1-year-old who (unbeknownst to us) also needed a passport. And how we, once again, ended up in the passport office, which delayed our tickets, which put us in Canada at 10 pm with an additional three-hour drive to our campsite with a (what we thought would be a camper) and ended up being a tent.

You get the idea. At one point, our traveling mishaps had become so frequent and so bad that I would get in the car for a 4-hour drive and just start crying. I wish I could say I handled all these interruptions with grace and was quoting Bible verses to myself, but that is far from the truth. Many tears were shed, and many fights were fought. It was not until a few years later that I looked back on these occurrences and saw something that was not just true for that season but for my whole life. I love peace and comfort. While peace and comfort at their best can be something that I offer to others through my home and presence, at its worst, they can become an idol of seeking my comfort more than anything else. Those first few years of married life were like a constant reminder that I was looking for peace in my external life, and I could not find it.

Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you, not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled and neither let them be afraid.” John 14:26-27 ESV. I knew in my head that Jesus is the ultimate source of peace, but my heart was still trying to find it somewhere else. Karin Peters said, “What we often see as God’s interruption is actually his intervention.” I can see now how God was using all these little (and sometimes big) traveling mishaps to show me that my comfort cannot be found in how easily my life plays out; it has to come from Christ alone.

We have learned a thing or two about traveling in our ten years of marriage. If you have any questions about passports, hit me up. But as a family working in full time ministry, interruptions are a constant part of our life. I can’t say that I have mastered the art of gracefully accepting every inconvenience, but I do think I have grown in it. Finding my peace in Jesus alone is something I will struggle with for the rest of my life. It is a daily Lordship issue of handing my comfort to Him. But I can say that one of the things I have grown in the most is my longing for heaven. In my constant quest for a perfect, peaceful home, I have found that the disappointments in life point me to my true home, where there will never be disappointments because we will be living with the ultimate source of comfort and peace, Jesus himself.

*Originally published in Every Little Seed - Interruptions