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, hopefully
enabling us to sort out our problems. At
the time we both felt things had gone too far for that: we turned
down the offer, and rejected 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 a few months ago 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 many misgivings, and my 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 have compared it. As I reflected on these ‘reject or repair’ decisions
my thoughts 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? Well, we can resolve to turn to God in
the first instance when trouble
strikes, and not to leave it until other avenues have been exhausted; having done that, we ought to feel secure in the knowledge that He CAN change things – even people!
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