Every morning, my 20 month-old son James wakes up at 5:30. It's early. He will not go back to bed. So I get up with him.

I give James a bottle of milk and a book or a toy. I walk over and open my Bible. I have a list of daily readings--two Psalms, Old Testment lesson, Epistle, and Gospel lesson. I try to read each one slowly, unrushed. I try to hear God's voice speaking to me. After I have read, I close my Bible and close my eyes... and I pray. I let the words come slowly, from a deep place... and I listen for God.

And then a book gets pressed into my leg. "Book?," the little voice asks. He wants me to read to him. Or he tries to crawl up in my lap. Or he bangs legos together, making it impossible to focus on the prophet Isaiah. Or he pesters me to turn on Baby Einstein.

My sacred moment is interrupted. It's hard to get back.

But that's OK. The spiritual life is not an uninterrupted life. It's a life defined by interruptions. It's how we pay attention to these interruptions that matters, I think. How do we recognize God in the interruptions? Where does someone need me?

The point of spiritual practices like scripture reading and prayer are not that we self-isolate and set ourselves aside from the world as holy men and women. The point of spiritual practices are so that we learn to pay attention to the people God places in our world--how can we serve them with the love of Christ?

As you prepare to go into Lent, I hope you are planning to take on some intentional spiritual practice: prayer, Scripture, acts of kindness. But remember to not treat these practices as ends in themselves. They are about a growing awareness to the mysterious ways of God.

Some days, I wish I could get through my morning prayers in peace. But in the end, it's all about the interruptions.