From a Girl Who was Comfortable

As a believer for 26 years, a full time church staff wife for thirteen years, after diligently serving the church my entire adult life, and after writing six Christian books for women, I thought I was done with entire life interruption for the kingdom. And yet…

God enlisted me in the cause of my generation, the mission of His true church when I thought I already had the Christian life figured out. I have never experienced transformation like I have in the last two years. I liken my life interruption to an adult conversion experience, which is exactly what it has been for me. I’ve never written about a subject that is more meaningful than this one. I am obsessed, convinced, transformed, and zealous. Everything about our life has changed, and I want to drag as many people as possible over the edge with me.

Part memoir, part journal entries, part confessional, and part exhortation from a girl whose comfortable involvement in the sequestered Christian subculture was interrupted in favor of serving the last, the least, the forgotten, and the forsaken. This is my story of moving from the west side to the south side, from big rockin’ church to teeny missional church plant, from serving the saved to serving the least.

As one member of the marketing team for Interrupted put it: “This is the book no one wants to read because everything might have to change.” I hope it will help you cast off the spiritual anchors of apathy, complacency, comfort, and boredom, which are drowning an increasing number of believers, rendering their faith and their churches irrelevant and obsolete.

I was asked recently, “How did Jesus interrupt your life?” The better question is: How HASN’T Jesus interrupted our life? Every bucket that held a paradigm, a worldview, a value, a habit, a system, a preference, a discipline, a comfort, or a conviction has been overturned. We spend our money differently. We celebrate holidays differently. We spend time with different people doing different things. We serve different people. We pray differently. We are burdened for different needs. We moved. We changed. We reimagined. We are being transformed.

Amid the chaos of utter change, we discovered a new joy in serving Jesus in the least of these, where He said he could always be found. We are learning what it means to be the church, a people who do not fight against culture, but for it. We have discovered the dangerous, exciting, unpredictable world of living on mission, and we’ll never go back. After 28 years of being a believer, I feel as if I’m finally starting to truly commune with Jesus.

I heard the concept of “God’s kingdom” reframed recently, as kingdom language has less relevance to western believers who don’t live in that political context. Whenever we read “God’s kingdom”, imagine it as “God’s dreams for this planet.” So my new prayer is:

“God, your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” — “God, may all your dreams for this planet come true, starting with me.”