Day 4 – Issue 19

Be Still Know

Jonah 1:17 NLT

‘Now the Lord had arranged for a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was inside the fish for three days and three nights.’

Cast adrift in the stormy sea, finally obedient to God’s word and having confessed his sin, Jonah is consumed by a great fish appointed by God for the time Jonah came to his senses, or his crew mates lost theirs. Letting go and letting God, a popular Christian aphorism, is never safe.

Navigating the uncertain channels of our voyage with MS, Katey and I had a long battle to let go of our preferences and yield to God’s. It was, in fact, the last thing we wanted to do. Our objective that God might heal Katey and in the process give great glory to God’s name, was difficult to let go of. While I have written elsewhere of the reality of healing as wholeness, in this instance it was recognising that although faithful disciples, we struggled with making room for God on the bridge of our life. Our solutions were the substance of our prayer, and God’s response was to answer and provide those solutions.

Maybe Jonah recognised he couldn’t resist the will of God. For me it was the latter; a realisation that maybe God was at the heart of our crisis of ill health and somehow we had to find God in the sickness. We can characterise God’s presence in some things, its absence in others. We have to find God in everything, despite our reluctance, fear, disappointment and anger.

Once we paused and looked for God, our journey became a quieter affair as we pursued God’s presence. Deeply impacted by Katey’s steady decline, we sought God in our disappointment, anxiety and fear. God was there, for he had always appointed a great fish to consume us and provide us with a home in stormy waters. It may not have offered the choicest of surroundings, yet it was God’s haven in harrowing times. Obscured from public view, we lost touch with the mainstream, and found all the time in the world to focus upon the main event, our friendship with God, with each other and with ourselves. Tragic circumstance became our practical seminary.

QUESTION: Whose preferences will prove most enduring, yours or God’s?

PRAYER: Lord, help me to pray as your Son taught us to pray, “not our will but yours be done”.