Several of my friends have had their kids transition into college this fall. From a large gallery of pictures on Facebook, to parent blogs, to a multitude of tear-filled conversations, I can tell you I am not looking forward to the time when I have to do the same. I’ve already had a tough enough time with my oldest making the transition to high school, and I know I’m going to blink and he will be attending college.

Transitions and interruptions to life as a whole are tough. Just yesterday I had a phone conversation with a woman who is in the public eye and whose life has been shattered by her husband’s infidelity. Her life, her husband’s life, and her family’s life will never be the same again.  To say it’s a transition is to put it lightly and to say it’s a mere interruption to life is far too cavalier of a statement when it involves this much pain.

Nevertheless, for the sake of today’s post, I’d like to make the case that these high level interruptions to life are transitions in and of themselves. More specifically, life as we know it has to be interrupted for our focus to be changed. Infidelity caused me to change what I was looking at in life and what my heart and gaze were fixated upon. I had become enamored with my own wannabe celebrity status and how many people I was speaking to and how many planes I was on and who I was having dinner with each night. I lost focus on the Lord, humility, thankfulness and Samantha’s needs. As Rick would say, “I let it become about me, and I never win when it’s all about me.”

I’ve come to see, not minimize, but see our lives blowing up 9 years ago as an interruption to auto pilot. Its effect was that of an atom bomb to Samantha and our lives as we knew it. On a deeper level, it caused us both to get off auto pilot and see life completely differently. I had to allow my value system to be completely rebooted and Samantha had to see our marriage rebooted. I’ll never justify my affair or imply that at some level my affair was Samantha’s fault. I’ll say that till my passing. Yet, we had both lost focus and we both had allowed ourselves to become prisoners of dysfunction, hurt and selfishness.

Today, by my own choice, I have to choose to interrupt my own life to adjust, alter and reboot some things. It’s one thing to adjust when you’ve been deceived and self-absorbed, but it’s a completely different thing to adjust life when it’s not having to be done to you. You decide to do it of your own accord. It’s allowing the interruption you feel in life to be used to cause you to see things differently, see yourself differently and even see your spouse differently.  These interruptions can absolutely change the entire fabric of your personhood and understanding of life itself. I would challenge you to identify what needs to be interrupted and what needs to be shattered to pave the way for healing and personal restoration. Yes, it would have been wonderful to interrupt it on our own, but most of us unfaithful were not smart enough to make right decisions. Our lives have had to be interrupted but all hope is not lost and all potential is not decimated. Take courage today and interrupt your own habit patterns.