Father God, interrupt us. Wake us up. Turn our hearts back to You.

We need an interruption from the oversaturation of input and a wake-up from the lull of indifference toward God.

There is an idolatrous hush over us as we hide behind the busyness of our handheld sources in life that we carry everywhere. We consume information constantly on social media, news, entertainment, opinions, algorithms, and now AI-generated answers yet somehow remain spiritually hungry.

We might cry poverty and lack but even our homeless eat hot meals, get clothing and handouts and government aid and cell phones.

But by many measures, we are living in an age of unprecedented acceleration but I say we’re in a season of lack of hunger for God whether we recognize it or not.

If we continually feed ourselves on one another’s reasoning, social media, whatever the news and media put before us, whatever AI sycophancy (people pleasing) regurgitated back to us, and self-defined identities and straw-man versions of truth that we perpetuate to the extreme, where does it all lead?

Don’t let hope drift away
Slowly we drift further and further away from God. If we’re not interrupting this vacuous emptiness, it will ultimately lead to death, destruction, and the erosion of hope.

Overfed with byproducts
How many people do you know are feeding on everything else but are indifferent towards God who do not read the Bible?

Perhaps we can add to this the absence of God’s will in their lives in His design for community to gather together and maybe attend church or at least a small fellowship groug in fellowship my with believers who are actively seeking Him, pursuing His ways, learning to walk in the Spirit and in Truth, and encouraging one another to follow Him.

I would say personally when we are overfed on everything (some really good stuff too…not all bad) but God we leave no room for seeking Him.

Belief in His existence and a desire to go to Heaven when we die is not following Him.

As I have been reading through the entire Bible and recently reaching Jonah. Most of us know Jonah’s story. We focus on his disobedience and his running from God’s command, being thrown overboard, swallowed by a great fish, and spending three days inside it before finally agreeing to obey God and deliver God’s warning to Nineveh.

But there is something else happening in this story that has been challenging me.

Jonah hated the Ninevites because they were indifferent to God and more of their own gods, small ‘g’.

But while Jonah was running away from God’s call on his life God interrupted the lives of ALL the Ninevites. He had begun a work of softening hearts, opening eyes and understanding so when Jonah shouted 8 words into the large city they
immediately ALL responded from the top down.

Eight words.

And ALL responded.

Not just a few people.

Not just the poor.

Not just the marginalized.

From the greatest to the least.

Even the king responded.

They fasted. They mourned. They prayed. They turned from their evil ways and stopped their violence.

And God saw their response.

Jonah 3:3–10 tells us that when God saw that they had turned from their evil ways, He showed them mercy.

That makes me wonder:

What if God is still looking for an interruption?

What if, beneath all the noise, distraction, arguments, identities, opinions, algorithms, entertainment, and endless streams of information, there are people whose hearts God is already preparing?

Jonah 3:3-10 NLT
[3] This time Jonah obeyed the Lord’s command and went to Nineveh, a city so large that it took three days to see it all. [4] On the day Jonah entered the city, he shouted to the crowds: “Forty days from now Nineveh will be destroyed!” [5] The people of Nineveh believed God’s message, and from the greatest to the least, they declared a fast and put on burlap to show their sorrow. [6] When the king of Nineveh heard what Jonah was saying, he stepped down from his throne and took off his royal robes. He dressed himself in burlap and sat on a heap of ashes. [7] Then the king and his nobles sent this decree throughout the city: “No one, not even the animals from your herds and flocks, may eat or drink anything at all. [8] People and animals alike must wear garments of mourning, and everyone must pray earnestly to God. They must turn from their evil ways and stop all their violence. [9] Who can tell? Perhaps even yet God will change his mind and hold back his fierce anger from destroying us.” [10] When God saw what they had done and how they had put a stop to their evil ways, he changed his mind and did not carry out the destruction he had threatened.

A sobering reminder from history
While reading commentaries on Jonah, I came across a portion of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation for a National Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.

His words are striking because he described a nation blessed with extraordinary abundance and yet warned that prosperity had produced self-sufficiency and pride:

Lincoln continued by acknowledging that the nation had received abundant blessings, yet had begun to imagine that those blessings were the result of its own wisdom and virtue rather than God’s gracious hand.

He called the nation to humility, fasting, and prayer.

More than 160 years later, his warning feels remarkably relevant.

Abundance can become an idol when it causes us to forget the One who provided it.

“But we have forgotten God.”

[…We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. Which in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do by this my proclamation designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer] Proclamation 97—Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer | The American Presidency Project https://share.google/BqcJOKNh6kzlYjZdd ]