Alise Write: Interruptions

photo © 2010 Mike | more info (via: Wylio)
My dogs have been making me a little crazy lately.

Despite living in town, there are a number of deer that roam around our neighborhood at various times. Lately, they've been paying a visit to our yard at all hours and our dogs feel the need to let them know that they see them and if they were allowed out of the house, they would totally be chasing them down.
Now, if these outbursts of dog barking happened at 8 or 9PM, I'd be annoyed, but whatever. That's just more noise in an already noisy house. I can deal with that. But these deer are smart enough to recognize that the neighborhood is relatively quiet around 1AM. And 2AM. And 4AM. (Either they don't care about 3AM or I'm so exhausted at that point, I miss that round.)
I'm finding that interrupted sleep is not particularly restful. Even if I manage to hack together six or seven hours of sleep, I'm still waking up feeling not as perky as I like to feel.
Being interrupted is never fun. If I'm interrupted when I'm speaking, I'll probably lose my train of thought and go off on some tangent that has nothing to do with what I was talking about in the first place. If I'm interrupted when I'm writing, it will usually take me a good while to get back into the flow again. If I'm interrupted when I'm cooking, we're probably having something unintentionally blackened for supper.
Of course, none of these things really matter (well, the kids might beg to differ on the last one, but what do they know, right?).
But sometimes we get interrupted on things that do matter. Or at least, matter to us.
A few years ago, I got interrupted on my love of music. I have loved music forever, and playing in church has been something I've done almost as long as I've been playing the piano. I love playing pretty much any time, but I especially love playing in church. It's where I feel the most at home.
And in the midst of a season where I really felt like God was moving through music I was playing, I was interrupted. Told that it was just performance. My motives were considered suspect, my faith brought into question.
That interruption kept me from any kind of meaningful playing for a couple of years.
Interruptions are going to happen. We can't stop them. But we can choose how to respond to them. We can choose to let them stop us in our tracks or we can choose to move past them.