Leadership: When God Breaks In
God provides the wind, but man must raise the sails. St. Augustine
Gregg’s Reflection
Kairos: When God Breaks In
We all encounter moments—some dramatic, some barely perceptible—when God interrupts the flow of our lives. These are Kairos moments: grace-filled pauses when something deep stirs, and the still small voice of God invites us to change direction.
I was introduced to the Learning Circle through Mike Breen and 3DM years ago, and it became a crucial tool in my discipleship. It became a core of discipleship work at our church, offering a pattern for transformation—helping us notice where God was speaking and how we might respond.
So many of us oscillate between good intentions and old habits. We want to grow, to live with deeper faith, but something cycles us back. What if we paused at the moment of interruption—at that Kairos moment—and asked: What is God saying? What will I do about it?
The Learning Circle guides us through Repentance and Belief:
Observe what just happened.
- Reflect on it deeply.
- Discuss it with a trusted companion.
Then:
- Plan a way forward.
- Invite Accountability to stay true.
- Act with courage and intention.
The path is simple, not easy. But it is transformational.
One of my favorite insights from James Finley is this:
You hear a talk about the spiritual life. It seems like an incredible feat. You exhaust yourself in all your ordinariness, and you cannot reach the place. Then God enters, lowers the bar to the ground, and you walk right in.
God meets us right where we are. The Kairos moment is a door. The Learning Circle helps us step through. It leads us to these two questions:
True learning results in changed behavior. Join us as we explore how Kairos moments and the Learning Circle can help spark transformation in your life. Blessings, Gregg
Journaling Prompts
What Kairos moment have you recently experienced? (A conversation, disruption, insight, emotion, or divine whisper?) What is God saying to you through this moment? (Observe and Reflect) Who could you share this with for wise counsel or discernment? (Discuss) What specific change is the Spirit inviting you to make?
(Plan) Who can hold you accountable in love? (Account) What is one action step you will take this week? (Act) What will you STOP doing? What will you START doing?
Scripture
There is a time (Kairos) for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.
Ecclesiastes 3:1. Every Kairos moment invites response—a chance to participate in the divine timing.
Your ears will hear a word behind you, ‘This is the way, walk in it.’
Isaiah 30:21. Listening for the still, small voice is key to discernment of the path
Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name. You are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
Psalm 86:11,15
“The time (Kairos) has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
Mark 1:15. This is the central verse upon which the Learning Circle is built: a Kairos moment (grace-filled interruption) that invites both Repentance (Observe, Reflect, Discuss) and Belief (Plan, Account, Act).
Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?
Luke 24:32. This evokes the kind of reflective pause (a Kairos moment) where recognition of God’s voice leads to changed direction.
Do not merely listen to the word… Do what it says… Whoever looks intently into the perfect law… and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.
James 1:22–25. This illustrates the transition from hearing (Reflect, Discuss) to obedience (Plan, Act).
Many Christians seek to cultivate those disciplines and practices that enable them to live the Christian life more faithfully. Scripture reminds us that the Christian faith is not only something we believe, but something we practice. Our beliefs are meant to be embodied in our lives. The world is quite right in assuming that if the way of Christ is true and life-giving, it ought to be able to look at our lives and see that way personified in what we do and say.
William Willimon, RENOVARE Bible introduction to Titus
They profess to know God but deny Him by their actions.
Titus 1:16.
Spiritual progress is the result of deliberate and discerning choices.
RENOVARE Bible notes on Hebrews
Make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.
2 Peter 1:5-7. As we grow in holiness, godliness, love and self-control, we become both more human and more like God. RENOVARE Bible Notes on this verse.
Apprenticeship to Jesus in the fellowship of his people is the only assured path of life under God. On that path we move from faith to more faith, from grace to more grace, and are able to walk increasingly in holiness and power.
RENOVARE Bible Notes NT p. 481
We must give God our rapt and undivided attention before we can catch a glimpse of his Kingdom through the veil of earthly time. But if we can learn to sit still in a room-or on a stump-and wrest our attention from the thousand chattering voices without and within, we will find ourselves gradually living more of our lives in that Kingdom.
RENOVARE Bible notes on Revelation NT p. 485
Ancient Writing
When you begin to read or listen to the Holy Scriptures, pray to God thus: "Lord Jesus Christ, open the ears and eyes of my heart so that I may hear Thy words and understand them, and may fulfill Thy will." Always pray to God like this, that He might illumine your mind and open to you the power of His words. Many, having trusted in their own reason, have turned away into deception.
St. Ephraim the Syrian
Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from heaven that every day calls out: ‘If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.’
St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue, verses 9–10, A Kairos moment may come, but it requires action—raising the sail—through repentance and belief.
God provides the wind, but man must raise the sails.
St. Augustine, This quote is widely circulated in Christian leadership and spiritual formation contexts as a paraphrased summary of Augustine’s teachings on grace and cooperation
Scripture grows with the one who reads it.
Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Preface or Book 20
The more our soul withdraws from disordered affections, the more it can be open to seek and find the will of God.
Ignatius of Loyola
When we are fallen because of frailty or blindness, then our gracious Lord inspires us, stirs us and calls us, and then he wills that we see our wretchedness and humbly let it be acknowledged. But He does not wish us to remain thus. Nor does He will that we busy ourselves greatly about accusing ourselves, nor does He will that we be full of misery about ourselves; for He wills that we quickly attend to Him; for He stands all alone and waits for us constantly, sorrowing and mourning until we come, and hastens to take us to himself, for we are His joy and delight and He is our cure and our life.
Julian of Norwich, Complete Julian, p. 357
Daily Examen of Consciousness: Reflect on moments in the last day when you were aware of God’s presence, and moments when you were distracted.
A Jesuit Practice
I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be. But, but the grace of God, I am not what I was.
John Newton, author of Amazing Grace
Modern Writing
Discipleship is learning to live like Jesus by doing what Jesus did and responding to the voice of the Father.
Mike Breen and Steve Cockram, Building a Discipling Culture
The first act of love is always the giving of attention.
Dallas Willard, Often cited from Willard’s oral teachings and recorded interviews. The first step in the Learning Circle is Observation. Attention to God’s movement precedes reflection and transformation.
Compunction is the awareness of God working in us, in which He awakens us to our true condition before Him through a shock, sting, a puncture wound, a sensation of being poked. It is often thought of as 'godly sorrow' but not just simply sorrow for sin, but a simultaneous awareness of the love and grace of God.
This work of the Holy Spirit operates in a kind of cycle as compunction leads to humility, humility to mercy, mercy to forgiveness. We are drawn closer to God, our desire for Him is enlarged; our self knowledge is increased and there is planted in us a deeper longing to experience more of His love and grace and less of our apathy and compromise.
Whenever we fall again and lose our peace through guilt or shame, we find the same cycle begins anew as through God-given compunction leading to repentance, we find again self awareness of who we are before Him. Then with humility we discover afresh His loving mercy and forgiveness, and regain our desire for him alone. This wisdom is not taught from books, but from the daily experience of life being lived in seeking after God.
Celtic Daily Prayer, Book Two, p. 1164
Seek one thing alone: to purify your love of God more and more, to abandon yourself more and more perfectly to His will and to love Him more exclusively and more completely, but also more simply and more peacefully and with more total and uncompromising trust.
Thomas Merton, What is Contemplation, p. 55-65
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living; we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
Richard Rohr, Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer. This mirrors the shift from Repent (thinking differently) to Believe (acting differently).
Stories of man with tragic flaws, backtracking, blind spots, denials, and betrayals fill the Scriptures; in fact, they are the norm. Yet They were used by God, each in his own way part of the divine plan. Furthermore, none of us lives half the truth we do know. Still, we know it’s the truth, and it keeps urging us forward with holy discontent. It keeps inviting us through the unbelievably patient voice of God. You do not need to get to the north star to be totally guided by it.
Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 360
Discipline means creating space in our lives where the voice of God can be heard.
Henri Nouwen, Source: Making All Things New: An Invitation to the Spiritual Life. This is the very goal of the Kairos moment: to pause, listen, and respond.
The great conversion in our life is to recognize and believe that the many unexpected events are not just disturbing interruptions in our projects, but the way in which God molds our hearts and prepares us for his return.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 7/10/22
We are transformed in the process of being radically open to the gift of life as it is given.
James Finley, CAC podcast Turning to the Mystics, this is a close paraphrase of a theme he repeats often, particularly in his teaching on Thomas Merton. The Learning Circle helps us recognize that gift (Kairos), receive it through repentance, and embody it through action.
You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
C.S. Lewis
The deepest currents of awakening and discovery only begin to flow in us through the intentional, practiced silence of the contemplative way.
Brian McLaren