“Compassion interrupts our lives.”
That’s what my pastor said this past Sunday morning in his
message. As I stood near the back of the church, rocking my fussy baby and
trying to get her to take her morning nap there in my arms, I couldn’t help but
give a bit of a sigh. As a stay-at-home mom of a toddler and a baby, it
sometimes seems like my life consists solely of interruptions and multitasking,
as well as the half-completed tasks and frazzled mental state they leave in
their wake. I wasn’t sure I could handle any more interruptions, whether they
came about because I was moved by compassion, or moved by a desire to stop my
toddler from peeing on the floor. Or something like that.
Don't get me wrong: I agree with it one hundred percent on paper. How
many times in the Bible have I read that Jesus’ ministry was interrupted by
someone asking for healing for themselves or for a loved one? And he never
says, “Sorry, but I’ve got too much on my plate right now… saving souls and all
that.” No, he stops what he’s doing, not because he has to, but because he’s moved
by compassion (Mark 1:40-42; Matthew 14:13-14; Matthew 20:29-34). Which kind of makes me think that maybe these weren’t just disruptions of his ministry, but the very means of it. The way he got to
people wasn’t with high-sounded arguments or ideals, but with his acts of love.
It was through his ministry of allowing himself to be interrupted.
Now, that’s something I need to live out better with my
kids. I realize that it’s in and through those disturbances that the real
work of motherhood happens. But still… by the time 10:00 that night rolled
around, I’d about hit my limit. I was standing by the stove, stirring a pot of
applesauce and hoping that it hadn’t burned too badly during the time it had
taken me to soothe Caleb after his nightmare (another disruption!). As I did, I was
scrolling mindlessly through my newsfeed, half asleep and barely seeing any of
the posts: in my head I was mourning the fact that the much-needed, 8-straight
hours of sleep I wanted so badly was extremely unlikely.
And then my gaze caught on a post from a stranger in one of
the mom groups I’m a part of (I’m really cool, I know), and my eyes filled up
with tears.
See, in the post, a new mom shared that she was at the
children’s hospital with her baby, who had been given the damning label of
“failure to thrive”. Breastfeeding hadn’t been going smoothly for her and her
baby was refusing formula, so she was sending out a desperate plea for donor
milk.
Here’s a truth I didn’t know until I had a baby: breastfeeding
is hard. Sure, it’s natural, and it’s definitely kind of a superpower…
but that doesn’t mean it is easy. For me, it’s up there with childbirth as one
of the most difficult things I’ve done. With Caleb, I had a bazillion issues on
top of the normal aches and pains of figuring it out: thrush, mastitis, and
weekly clogged ducts on my end; difficult staying latched on Caleb’s end. Eleanor has puked on me almost daily for three straight months as we tried to
figure out her reflux issue: it’s only recently that this unfortunate trend has
slowed and we’ve narrowed the cause down to a dairy allergy.
But in all of this, neither of my babies ever stopped
gaining weight. Neither of them had to be hospitalized because I couldn’t get
them the nutrients they needed, whether through breastfeeding or pumping or formula.
And so when I saw that stranger’s post… when I imagined myself in that new
momma’s shoes… well, cue the waterworks.
Interrupted by compassion? You bet.
And so that’s why my applesauce again went untended
(although this time I turned off the stove before it could burn). See, I had
literal gallons of expressed milk in our deep freezer, most of which had
been pumped before I cut dairy from my diet. It was useless to me because
Eleanor couldn’t eat it without throwing up. But it was perfect for this
new momma’s sweet little son.
It didn’t matter at all, then, that Eric and I had to sort with
numb fingers through what felt like a million 4-oz bags of frozen milk. It
didn’t matter that the children’s hospital was a 40-minute drive, one way. And
it didn’t matter that what would turn out to be another broken night of sleep
had gotten that much shorter.
All that mattered is that we’d allowed ourselves to be interrupted by
compassion. In a weird and completely unexpected way, God used what we had: a
freezer full of unusable expressed breastmilk. And the next night, as I stood on my porch hugging this stranger-turned-friend, both of us with tears in our eyes,
I was absolutely sure of one thing: interruptions are the heart of ministry.
