When God Interrupts: Finding New Life Through Unwanted Change

by M. Craig Barnes

Book Overview

Our lives are constantly changing. It's hard to keep up, to keep our balance. It's hard to keep trusting in God. And it's especially difficult when the changes we're faced with are unwanted: the death of a loved one, a child leaving home, an illness, a frustrated dream. Craig Barnes knows the dark side of change. As a pastor, he has counseled many Christians through tough times of transition. And he has been challenged by unwanted changes--interruptions--in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0830819797
• ISBN13: 9780830819799
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: IVP
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

When God Interrupts

This is an excellent read for everyone. We have all suffered loss of a dream of one kind or another. This book is written by a man who had his own loss as well as shared in the loss of others. His insites are very helpful and he avoids the platatudes that many writers use. Very helpful.

Very encouraging book

I have read and enjoyed many "help" type books but this one really impacted me. It doesn't focus on how to fix your problem -- it focuses on how God shows Himself to you during those hard times.

good transaction

product as described - shipped promptly - good transaction with seller. this is a great book - thanks

Another incredible book

I thought after I read Sacred Thirst (which mysteriously appeared in the back of my car and remained there for over a year) that there was no point in reading any of the other books by Craig Barnes becasue they would never measure up to this one. I was wrong. I have read 3, bought 6 and am on my fourth. This one is beautifully written, as are all his books. Maybe this one goes even deeper to the heart of the matter, which I would say is Barnes' specialty. He tells more truth, the deep, hard truth, and somehow leaves you changed and deeply grateful for having heard it. The way I use these books is this: I read a small section (all Barnes' books are organized into smaller sections within each chapter) as part of my morning devotion. This and his other books have made an enormous impact on me and the people I've shared them with.

Conversion: a journey from confusion to terror

Several years ago as I was in the midst of meticulously charting the expected course of a job change, a wise friend told me: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." "When God Interrupts" by M. Craig Barnes, pastor of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., is the book to turn to in those disquieting moments when it becomes clear the plans we have made -- perhaps staked our futures upon -- have become finally so much dust. In accessible and at times deeply-moving prose it helps the sympathetic reader get beyond the question "Why me, Lord?" that inevitably accompanies such disappointment to a deeper understanding of what it means to worship a God whose ineffable grace is often to refuse us what we insist we want most. "When God Interrupts" is book of hard contemporary wisdom set firmly within the Christian tradition. It is only secondarily a work of inspiration, although it contains passages that will invariably draws tears of recognition, and it will bring absolutely no comfort to those used to browsing the self-help literature for answers to their problems. It is a book for those who may have labored for years under the illusion that they have somehow taken the measure of God, at last understood His will, and are now ready to accept His reward for all their faith and righteousness. God's silence at the other end of this "deal" can be overwhelming, but for Barnes such moments, and he refers to them here and in other contexts as abandonments, are an invitation, a challenge to finally give to God what He wants most from us: ourselves. One quotation is sufficient to catch the thrust of the book: "When we are abandoned by the things we value, when we discover that no matter how much we have gathered we do not have enough, when we realize that even in the currency we value we are very poor, we are ready to start talking to God. Not before. Faith means betting our lives on the grace of God. (page 75)" This is a book in the tradition of Peter Kreeft's "Making Sense of Suffering" but one that gets substantially closer to the felt experience of living a loss and the painful journey back to a God we may feel -- and perhaps have great justification for feeling -- chose to challenge us where we are most vulnerable and then disappear. Barnes's himself recognizes that these are journeys we may not wish to take, likening us on one occasion to Christ's disciples soundly sleeping through His agony in the Garden of Gethsemani, but once the journey is undertaken, it can, will, must lead to new life. God asks of us everything that we have, and more to the point, all that we are, but in the end He leaves us, and Barnes is entirely convincing on this point, with "a purer form of ourselves(page 157)."