There’s a particular sound every long-distance driver any expressway knows well — the sudden shudder of a tyre blowing out at speed, forcing an unplanned stop on a shoulder you never intended to see. Nobody schedules a breakdown. It always arrives exactly when you have somewhere else to be, disrupting a plan that felt, until that moment, perfectly reasonable.
And yet more than a few travelers along the Lagos – Ibadan Expressway or the many interstate roads in Nigeria or any country, have their own version of the same story: the breakdown that put them exactly where a stranger needed help changing a tyre, or where they overheard a conversation that mattered, or where they simply weren’t where the accident up ahead eventually happened. The interruption, infuriating in the moment, turns out later to have been the actual appointment — the planned journey was just the thing that had to be delayed to get you there.
Scripture is full of exactly this pattern: God’s most significant appointments rarely arrive on anyone’s calendar. They arrive as interruptions.
A Funeral Procession Interrupts a Funeral Procession
Christ was walking toward the town of Nain with His disciples and a large crowd, presumably with somewhere specific to be, when His own procession collided with another:
“And when He came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother; and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her. When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said to her, ‘Do not weep.‘” — Luke 7:12-13, NKJV
There was no appointment on any schedule for this. Two crowds, moving in opposite directions, happened to meet at a city gate. And in that collision — completely unplanned, entirely inconvenient, forcing Christ’s own procession to stop — a widow’s only son was raised from death (Luke 7:14-15). The miracle didn’t happen because someone arranged the perfect setting for it. It happened because Christ was willing to let an interruption reroute Him entirely.
The Woman Who Interrupted an Emergency
Perhaps the clearest example in all of Scripture: Jairus, a synagogue ruler, came to Christ in genuine crisis — his twelve-year-old daughter was dying, and every minute mattered (Mark 5:22-23). Christ agreed to go. And on the way, in the middle of that time-sensitive emergency, He stopped completely for someone else’s interruption:
“Now a certain woman had a flow of blood for twelve years… When she heard about Jesus, she came behind Him in the crowd and touched His garment. For she said, ‘If only I may touch His clothes, I shall be made well.’… And He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your affliction.’“ — Mark 5:25, 27-28, 34, NKJV
By any reasonable scheduling logic, this was the worst possible moment for a delay — a girl was dying while Christ stopped to identify who had touched His robe in a crushing crowd. And yet the text is explicit that this wasn’t a brief pause. He stopped, asked who touched Him, waited for her to come forward trembling, and spoke a full blessing over her (Mark 5:30-34) — all while Jairus’s daughter’s condition worsened, and word arrived that she had, in fact, died before Christ finished (Mark 5:35). The interruption cost something real. And Christ still raised the girl anyway (Mark 5:41-42). Two appointments, both genuinely urgent, both fully honoured — because the God who keeps appointments was never in as much of a hurry as the humans around Him assumed He should be.
Philip, Pulled Off One Assignment Into Another
Philip was in the middle of what Scripture describes as significant, fruitful ministry in Samaria — genuine revival, by the account given (Acts 8:5-8) — when an angel gave him an instruction that must have seemed, on its face, like a step backward:
“Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, ‘Arise and go toward the south along the road which goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ This is desert.“ — Acts 8:26, NKJV
Leave a thriving ministry to go stand on an empty desert road. No explanation given at the time. Philip obeyed anyway, and the interruption turned out to be an Ethiopian official, reading Isaiah in his chariot, whom Philip led to Christ on the spot (Acts 8:27-38) — a single convert whose conversion tradition holds carried the gospel into an entire region history barely credits Philip for reaching. The revival in Samaria was the plan. The empty desert road was the actual appointment.
A Story Worth Sitting With
I know a doctor who was rushing between wards on an unusually demanding shift, already behind schedule, when an elderly patient in a hallway asked him, almost in passing, to simply sit with her for a few minutes because she was frightened about an upcoming procedure. Every instinct told him to keep moving — real patients with real emergencies were waiting. He sat anyway, for perhaps ten minutes, mostly just listening. It was during that unplanned pause that he noticed something in her breathing pattern that hadn’t been flagged in her chart, a detail that led to a diagnosis catching a serious complication early enough to treat it properly. He has said since that the ten minutes he was most annoyed about losing that day turned out to be the most important ten minutes of his entire shift — and that he’s tried, imperfectly, ever since, to hold his schedule loosely enough to notice when an interruption might actually be the appointment.
There’s a proverb worth carrying into every inconvenient pause: the traveler who refuses every detour never finds the well hidden off the main road.
Five Questions Worth Sitting With
- What interruption have I resented recently that might actually have been an appointment in disguise?
- Do I hold my schedule so tightly that I’ve trained myself to miss what doesn’t fit inside it?
- Like Christ with the woman in the crowd, could I stop fully for one person even while another urgent need is still waiting?
- Is there a “desert road” I’ve been reluctant to walk because it looks like a step away from where I’m already fruitful?
- Who might God be asking me to notice today, in the middle of something else I’ve already planned?
Final Word
Nobody schedules a tyre blowing out on the expressway, and nobody scheduled a funeral procession colliding with another, or a bleeding woman reaching through a crushing crowd, or an angel’s odd instruction to stand on an empty desert road. The God who interrupts was never disorganized. He simply keeps a different calendar than the one we’re anxiously guarding — one where the detour is, more often than we’d like to admit, the actual appointment, and the delay is doing exactly what it was always meant to do, right on schedule, in the Kingdom of God’s own perfect timing.
