The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
When God Interrupts Your Normal
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Welcome to the Healthy Church Deck Podcast. My name is Todd Rhodes, and today we're kicking off a special Christmas series called Unwrap. And for the next two weeks, we're gonna be digging into parts of the Christmas story that usually don't make it onto the stage or the postcard, but maybe they should. So let's get into it. Here's the hard truth as we open up the series for Christmas. And by the way, I hope you're having a great Christmas season. I've been praying for all of you. I know that this is like the Super Bowl, right? This is an Easter. So I'm praying for you. God rarely waits for your life to settle down before showing up. In fact, if the Christmas story teaches us anything at all, it's that holy things tend to arrive right in the middle of chaos. So let's take a moment. Let's just rewind that nativity narrative for a moment and let's strip away all the glow because we tend to put all the glitter and glamour on the Christmas story a season during the Christmas season. But what really happened when Jesus came? Most scholars say that Mary was probably 13 or 14 years old, right? She was engaged but not yet married, and she was visited by an angel with news that would absolutely wreck her reputation. Life plans is marriage, career, just quiet, normal life. Man, was gone in an instant, completely derailed by somebody else's miracle. And then there's this awkward Roman census. Where did that come from? Mandatory travel, no health hotel reservations, no epidural ladies, no nursery, just a crowded city and a borrowed. They couldn't even find a place. They had to borrow a place to have the baby. And a baby in a barn, right? But here's the thing that most of us miss. God's most redemptive act in human history came through a time of total disruption. Not peace, not stability, not everything going our way and falling into place. And if we're being honest, that's exactly what ministry feels like a lot of the time. You've got your plans, your calendar, your service flow. You're carefully arranging all of your Advent series and getting ready for Christmas, and then right smack dab in the middle of it. Somebody resigns. Somebody on your staff gets sick. The room is full, and the technology fails. Or maybe the giving starts to dry up. Maybe the drama is just out of control. It just flares up, and your whole team is holding it together with caffeine and prayer. And you know what? It's easy to think this must not be how God moves. But what if it is? What if Christmas reminds us that God loves to show up in the middle of that instability? Not after we get the control, not once we've scheduled the miracle, but right in the middle of those interruptions. Here's the truth for you today. God isn't waiting for your normal to resume. He might be trying to break it open so something actually redemptive can begin. I've had a lot of Christmas seasons where I felt that I was just surviving, exhausted, spent, wishing things were a little bit calmer and quieter, maybe a little bit more holy. But I've learned through the years that holiness doesn't always feel sacred in the moment. Sometimes it does. It feels like chaos or confusion or that unexpected detour. That time where everything just feels like it's going wrong. But on the other side, and I look back at it, I can usually see that God was working the whole time. Not despite the mess, but through it. So I want to leave you with some reflection questions each day, and here they are for today. What part of your life or ministry, even during this busy advent season, feels most disrupted right now? And then I want you to ask this what if that disruption could be an invitation, not an interruption? Maybe take out your journal today and write down one area where your normal has been disrailed this month. Ask God to show you what he might be unwrapping in that's place. God You didn't wait for things to settle down to send Jesus, so help us not to wait for things to settle down to find you. Open our eyes to see you in these interruptions, in the undone plans and in the chaos, in the moments that we'd rather skip. Help us to trust that you're not late, that you're just right on time. That's day one of our unwrapped series for Christmas. I hope you'll join me every day as we finish off the rest of Advent for the next couple of weeks here on the podcast. And if there's any way that I can help you, you can reach out to me, or maybe you just got some Christmas thoughts, and maybe you just want to tell me Merry Christmas. You can do that too. Podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, I hope you'll join us again tomorrow. We're going to continue this unwrap series right here on the Healthy Church Death.
