God of the Gaps
A Reflection on the Grace of Interruptions
Earlier this week, I was racing out of Kennestone Hospital—already behind schedule. I had just finished praying with a beloved parishioner facing a setback in his cancer journey and was hurrying across town to visit yet another hospital, where yet another parishioner was preparing for serious surgery and needed the assurance of God’s healing presence. If the timing all worked out, I planned to dash back to the office for a diocesan Zoom meeting I was hoping not to miss.
It was one of those days where everything felt a little stacked, a little stretched—and I was doing my best to keep the collar on and the calendar moving.
Then, in the hallway outside the Purple Tower elevators at Kennestone, a voice rang out: “Hey, Father! Got a minute?”
For the briefest moment—truly just a breath and a half—I hoped he meant someone else. Maybe there was another priest nearby?
No, I was standing there in full cassock and collar. I knew he meant me.
So, I turned with my best impression of what I thought a better priest than me would do in that moment: “Sure, sir,” was what I could muster—trying to sound like the sort of calm, available priest people see in the movies: gentle, poised, and holy. Not the frazzled, impatient, and slightly grumpy dude I was, dressed up in priestly attire.
Then my whole day changed.
In the space of a few urgent minutes, I was led up the elevator by a young father to his immigrant wife—and beside her, their five-day-old daughter, Lilly, lay in a bassinet with more wires and tubes attached to her than there seemed to be baby to attach them to. On the elevator ride, I learned that Lilly was being prepared for emergent transport to Scottish Rite for open-heart surgery.
Five days old. Open heart surgery. Just try to imagine that.
The brief sequence of our encounter was Lilly’s dad had stepped out to grab coffee downstairs for himself and his wife—lapsed Catholics facing the scariest moment of their marriage so far. He said as soon as he saw me in the hallway, he felt an overwhelming need to have Lilly baptized before she was taken away by the specialized neonatal transport team and rushed off to surgery.
Overwhelmed and terrified, with a trembling kind of faith, he asked if I would baptize her, and his wife eagerly joined in the request.
I had no prayer book. No font. No Sacred Chrism. Just a cell phone in my pocket with the Book of Common Prayer app, a bit of oil from the prayers I had just offered over our elderly parishioner, and enough sense to know this was way more important than anything I had going on that day.
In a room with just the four of us—and a rather saintly nurse frantically preparing Lilly for transport—I stood beside that clear plastic bassinet and pulled up the baptismal liturgy on my phone. I asked her parents the ancient vows of the Church:
Will you by your prayers and witness help this child grow into the full stature of Christ…Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?...Will you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior?
They answered with tearful, steady voices:
I will, with God’s help….I renounce them….I will, with God’s help.
Then I cupped sterile saline in my palm, squired from an IV flush syringe handed to me by the nurse preparing this child for transport. And I baptized her in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. A baby girl, five days old, on the edge of what doctors could predict medically for her life ahead, was baptized, then sealed as Christ’s own forever.
I reached into my cassock and pulled out the oil stock I had used earlier to anoint our elder parishioner. It wasn’t Sacred Chrism, but it was Oil of the Infirm—and in that moment, I believed God didn’t mind. I made the sign of the cross on Lilly’s forehead, blessed her, and prayed with her family.
Then I rode the elevator back down and sat stunned in my truck.
Interrupted. Awed. Grateful.
Jesus’ entire ministry was built on interruptions. Nearly every one of his miracles happened while he was on his way to do something else.
He was on his way to heal Jairus’s daughter when the hemorrhaging woman touched the hem of his cloak (Mark 5:21–34). That healing wasn’t on the schedule. But Jesus stopped, turned, and called her “Daughter”—the only time in Scripture he uses that word. Her interruption became her salvation.
He was teaching in a crowded house when the ceiling literally broke open and a paralyzed man was lowered through the roof (Luke 5:17–26). Jesus could have been frustrated. Instead, he forgave the man’s sins and restored his body. The roof got wrecked—but a life got remade.
He was walking toward Jericho when a blind man named Bartimaeus cried out from the roadside (Mark 10:46–52). The crowd tried to hush him—“Don’t interrupt the Teacher!” But Jesus stopped. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. He listened. And then he healed him.
Interruptions aren’t accidents in the Gospels. They are often the very places where God’s grace shows up with power. In fact, the Cross itself—Jesus arrested while praying in Gethsemane, dragged through trials, forced down the road to Calvary—that was the greatest interruption of all. And it became the very means of our redemption.
This summer at Christ Church has felt like one long series of holy interruptions.
Our fire sprinkler and alarm system failed unexpectedly, leaving us with repairs I barely understand. Our Parish Hall flooded more than once from the relentless spring rains. A wave of illnesses among our people has kept Fr. Lenworth and me racing from bedside to bedside—prayer book in one hand, oil stock in the other.
But in the interruptions—always in the interruptions—God is near.
I’ve seen parishioners show up with shop-vacs and towels before I even knew we needed them. Lay chaplains have prayed at hospital bedsides and brought the sacraments to those hungry for Christ’s body and blood when clergy couldn’t get there. Engineers and technicians have explained systems I’ll never fully understand, but they’ve done it with kindness, patience, and a deep care for the safety of all who enter our sacred buildings.
Interruptions, it turns out, are where the Church lives.
Not in the perfect schedule—but in the messy middle.
Not just in planned liturgies—but in water cupped from syringes.
Not only in oil set apart by bishops—but in foreheads anointed with love and faith connecting them to the whole body of Christ in the world—the people.
So this week, if something unexpected derails your plans—pause.
Let grace catch up to you. Let God meet you in the hallway.
Because the Gospel is not a to-do list.
It is a life interrupted by love.
Pax et Bonum!
Fr. Ben +
