By The Way

This week I promised I would talk about three little words that can play havoc with my schedule.

By.

The.

Way.

As in:

By the way, I have a meeting tonight, so can we eat at 5:00 instead of 6:00?

By the way, I have a study session tonight.

By the way, the saxophone teacher texted me and needs to move lessons to another night.

By the way, did I tell you I have a concert tonight?

By the way.

No matter how much I prepare and organize, those three words come slinking along, when I least expect them, and interrupt my plan.

I find by the way to be in the way, when I am on my way. (Feel free to be impressed. I thought of that sentence myself.)

In the book Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen, he mentions visiting a university and walking around the campus with an older experienced professor. While they were walking the professor lamented, "You know...my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work."

Have you discovered this to be true? That the interruption of a child or a spouse, a friend or a stranger, is actually where life is found? Where the best of our work is discovered?

When Jesus and an expert in Mosaic law have a debate about eternal life in Luke 10, they agree on the point that it involves loving God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, but the expert wants clarity on who exactly is his neighbor.

Jesus tells him the story of the Good Samaritan. See Luke 10:25-37.

In the story a man is left half dead when he is robbed and beaten by thieves. Two religious leaders see him, but for various reasons, go around him. In other words, they were on the way when they found a man by the way and they treated him as in the way.

A Samaritan man, on the other hand, saw the man and stopped to tend his wounds and take him to an inn where he paid for his lodging and anything else he needed. The Samaritan was on the way, saw the injured man by the way, but didn't treat him as in the way. Rather, he showed the injured man compassion.

Jesus asks the Mosaic law expert who he thinks was the neighbor. The expert admits it was the one who showed mercy.

"Go and do the same," Jesus said (verse 37.)

Go and do the same. When I find by the way to be in the way when I am on my way, I am to show mercy. Compassion. The love of Jesus.

It is here that I will find life.

"Do this and you will live," Jesus says in verse 28."

What if our interruptions are in fact our opportunities, if they are challenges to an inner response by which growth takes place and through which we come to the fullness of being?" - Henri Nouwen

What will you do today - by the way, in the way and on the way?