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I have always thought of attention as something I give. I pay attention to a conversation. I pay attention when I read Scripture. I try to pay attention to the people around me rather than moving through the day without really seeing them. Attention, in that sense, feels intentional. It is something I can direct toward what I have decided deserves my focus.
Lately, though, I have been wondering whether attention asks something more difficult of me than simply deciding where to look. Sometimes seeing what is in front of me requires allowing my attention to be redirected from where I had already decided it belonged. It is one thing to look carefully at something I have chosen to see. It may be another thing entirely to remain attentive enough to notice what I did not choose.
I keep returning to the moment in Mark 5 when Jesus is walking toward Jairus’ home. A twelve-year-old girl is dying, and her father has fallen at Jesus’ feet and begged Him to come. Jesus goes with him. There is purpose to His movement and urgency in the need waiting at the end of it. I imagine there is urgency in Jairus’ movement too. Whatever else may be happening around them, his world has narrowed to one desperate need: get Jesus to his daughter.
Then, somewhere within the crowd pressing around Him, a woman who has suffered for twelve years reaches out and touches Jesus’ clothes.
Jesus stops.
I have written about this scene before, but I cannot seem to get past that movement—or rather, the sudden absence of movement. Jesus is already doing something important. He is not waiting for something meaningful to appear or moving casually through the crowd with time to spare. Someone needs Him. He has agreed to go. And from Jairus’ vantage point, surely every moment matters. Yet something happens that was not part of the journey as Jairus understood it, and Jesus allows it to become more than a passing moment.
I wonder if part of what unsettles me about His stopping is how differently I tend to think about interruption. An interruption is almost always defined in relation to something I have already decided matters. I am going somewhere, accomplishing something, finishing something, responding to something, thinking about something—and then something else intrudes. Even the word itself seems to assume a preferred direction: there is the thing I was supposed to be doing, and then there is the thing that got in the way.
Perhaps that is why interruptions can be so difficult to receive with curiosity. Before I have really looked at what has entered my attention, I may already have categorized it according to what it has done to my plans. It delayed me. Distracted me. Changed my schedule. Required something I had not intended to give. The interruption becomes defined by what it cost before I have considered what it might contain.
We have good reasons to protect our attention. In fact, we have become remarkably skilled at it. We silence notifications, block time on calendars, close doors, put in earbuds, filter messages, and learn to distinguish what is urgent from what merely wants to feel urgent. Much of that is necessary. We live surrounded by things designed to capture our attention, and we are human beings with limited time, limited capacity, and real responsibilities. Not every interruption is an invitation, and not every demand deserves access to us. Learning to see well cannot mean surrendering discernment about where we are going or what we have been given to do.
But I wonder whether there is another danger hiding inside all that necessary protection. Perhaps I can become so practiced at filtering out what does not belong to my plan that I begin filtering before I have really seen what is asking for my attention. The colleague who pauses at my door when I am trying to finish something. The child who begins telling a story at precisely the wrong moment. The conversation that wanders somewhere I had not intended it to go. The person whose question seems, at first, to be about one thing but turns out to be about something else entirely. None of these necessarily requires me to stop. But if I decide what an interruption is worth solely by what it costs my agenda, I may never become curious enough to discover what it contains.
Perhaps we can become very good at guarding our attention and still fail to be attentive.
That possibility makes me look differently at the crowd around Jesus. The disciples see people pressing against Him from every direction. Jairus has every reason to want Jesus to keep walking. Somewhere ahead of them is a little girl whose need could hardly be more urgent. And somewhere within all of that noise and movement is one woman who has been suffering for twelve years.
She does not call out or ask Jesus to change direction. In fact, she seems to want as little of His attention as possible. She reaches for His clothes believing that will be enough. And physically, it is. Mark tells us that she knows immediately that she has been freed from her suffering. Jesus could have continued toward Jairus’ home, and she would have received the thing she came seeking. The healing has already happened.
But Jesus stops.
He looks for her. He waits while she comes forward trembling. He listens as she tells Him the whole truth, and only then does He send her away in peace, calling her Daughter. That detail keeps catching me because His stopping is not necessary simply to accomplish the healing. Something else becomes possible because He refuses to let the encounter remain anonymous. The woman who hoped to disappear back into the crowd having received what she needed instead finds herself standing before the One she reached out to touch.
And all the while, Jairus is still waiting.
I wonder what this encounter looks like from where he stands. The woman has already been healed. His daughter is still dying. What Jesus is doing might not simply appear inconvenient to him; it might appear unnecessary. Jesus is spending time looking for someone who has already received what she needed while the need waiting at Jairus’ home remains desperately unresolved. We know how the story ends. Jairus does not. He has to stand inside the interruption without knowing what it will cost him.
That makes Jesus’ stopping harder for me to dismiss as a lovely lesson about slowing down. Sometimes the interruption does not arrive when I am doing something trivial. Sometimes it arrives in the middle of something that genuinely matters. The task may matter. The deadline may matter. The person waiting for me may matter. The direction I was already moving may be good and necessary. Perhaps the question is not whether the thing I was doing mattered, but whether I have left open the possibility that something else might matter too.
Had Jesus kept walking, the woman still would have been healed. But the encounter would have been different. She would have received healing without being called forward, heard, and named Daughter. Something became possible in the stopping that could not happen merely in the passing.
That makes me wonder how often I measure an interruption primarily by whether it prevents me from accomplishing what I intended to accomplish. Did I finish the task? Did I get where I was going? Did I solve the problem? Did I meet the need? Those are not unimportant questions, and responsibility sometimes requires that I keep moving. But perhaps they are not the only questions worth asking. There may be things I cannot see if the only measure I bring to an unexpected moment is whether it helped or hindered what I had already planned.
Because sometimes I can see the interruption without really seeing the person.
I do not think the lesson of Mark 5 is that I should stop for everything. I cannot, and Jesus’ capacity is not mine. Nor do I think every unexpected demand should be spiritualized into an assignment from God. Discernment still matters. Boundaries still matter. The responsibilities already entrusted to us still matter. But His stopping does make me wonder whether attention is something more than the ability to focus intently on what I have chosen. Perhaps attention also requires an openness to being redirected—to hold my plans firmly enough to move with purpose, but loosely enough that I can still recognize what I did not plan to see.
That kind of attention would require something from me that I am not sure I have always associated with seeing. It would require leaving enough room in a day, a conversation, a relationship, or even a familiar passage of Scripture for something unexpected to arrest my attention. It would mean resisting the instinct to decide too quickly that because something was not part of my plan, it cannot possibly be part of what deserves my notice.
I am beginning to suspect that some of the things most worth seeing will not wait politely for me to look in their direction. They may appear while I am already going somewhere. They may arrive inside the conversation I thought was about something else. They may be found in the detail of a familiar story I had learned to move past because I thought I already knew where it was going.
Perhaps learning to see requires more than attentiveness.
Perhaps it requires becoming interruptible.
September 8, 2026. Originally published on LinkedIn.