Cures and Remedies

What’s your reaction when something breaks, or no longer works properly?  It might be big or small, but nothing lasts for ever, they say, and at times like that decisions have to be made.  Inevitably these will be broadly either a) ‘find the remedy/repair/ spare part and fix it: it could be as good as new in a few minutes/days/months,’ or b) ‘throw it away and get another one/start again.’

Some years ago, when my first wife told me she was seeing someone else – and why – a friend made us a very generous offer: he and his wife would look after our children while we went off for a week to his holiday home on the Suffolk coast, to spend some quality time getting to know each other properly again, and hopefully enabling us to sort out our problems.  At the time each of us felt things had gone too far for that: we decided to turn down the offer, to reject the possibility of saving our marriage.  Our decision was firmly in the ‘throw away and get a new one’ category.  Sadly her new relationship lasted only a few months, and each of us then passed through several lonely years.

I was reminded of this recently when I confronted the fact that my new mobile phone appeared not to be working properly.  I won’t bore you with the symptoms, but the upshot was that it had become unreliable.  I rang the phone company, and spoke to a technician who guided me through the necessary steps to return the phone to its original settings.  Despite my many misgivings, and the certainty that what I really needed was a replacement phone, I persevered and tried to use it normally over the next week or so, to see whether the reset had done the trick.

As the days passed, and the phone did indeed seem to be working properly, I found my misgivings diminished.  It was a slow process, however; only gradually did I learn to accept that the remedy had worked.  This experience was the opposite of the marital situation to which I had compared it.  My reflections on these ‘reject or repair’ decisions touched on the Old Testament story of Jonah.  You will recall how, after first rejecting God’s instructions, the prophet eventually went to Nineveh and was so successful in his mission that the people turned to God in shame and repentance.  Jonah couldn’t really believe this, and found it difficult to accept the result.

So, what can I – indeed all of us, now I’ve shared the matter – take from this?  Simply this: let’s resolve to turn to God in the first instance when trouble strikes, and not to leave it until other avenues have been exhausted; and secondly, having done so, we should feel secure in the knowledge that He CAN change things – even people!