When God Interrupts

We wait for the "perfect time" to make a change. Life rarely works that way.

Many of us have become perpetual students, endlessly enrolled in the School of Self-Improvement but never quite graduating. There’s always one more podcast to absorb, one more therapy breakthrough to unlock, one more list of red flags to memorize before we’re “ready” for real life. We wait for a future, perfected version of ourselves to arrive and take over the messy business of actually living.

Meanwhile, life—with all its beautiful, inconvenient invitations—keeps knocking.

Freya India, a Gen Z writer, observes that many in her generation “have grown up surrounded by a fear of love,” often raised by older generations anxious for them and haunted by their own heartbreak.¹

The result is a quiet consensus: we must perfect ourselves before we can love. Marriage, children, serious commitment—especially when you’re young—are treated as reckless unless preceded by sufficient healing.

So we wait. Marriage can come after therapy resolves our attachment issues. Children can come once we’ve achieved emotional competence. Love becomes a graduate program with prerequisites.

There’s something almost reasonable about this. Why wouldn’t you want to be your best self before making serious commitments? Why rush when you could be wiser, healthier, more whole?

Except wholeness doesn’t work that way.

You don’t solve yourself in isolation and then present a completed puzzle to the world. The most important work of becoming who we’re meant to be doesn’t happen in controlled environments. It happens in the chaos of commitment.

India writes, “I find it sad to see so many young people in therapy and watching all these self-improvement podcasts and trying to think themselves into being better, when really committing to a relationship—taking on responsibilities they aren’t completely ready for, taking a brave step toward someone while still incomplete—might turn them into who they want to become.”

We’ve been sold the idea that growth happens through enough journaling, meditation, and processing that thing from childhood. Those practices matter, but they were never meant to replace the crucible of real responsibility.

India puts it plainly: “We got it wrong. We thought the answer to failed marriages and broken families was less commitment, when it was clearly more.”

Love doesn’t demand perfection as an entry fee. Commitment doesn’t cap growth; it catalyzes it.

And so it is with grace. When God knocks, He doesn’t check if the house is clean or wait for your “true self” to emerge from a podcast episode.

Transformation happens through the interruption—when something larger than your plans breaks in and asks more of you than you’re ready to give.

The question isn’t whether we’ll ever be ready. We won’t be.

The question is whether we’ll have the courage to say yes anyway.

1. Despite being neither a girl nor a member of Gen Z, I look forward to reading India’s upcoming book, GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, which will come out in May.