by Tom Flaherty
I had a very painful encounter with God while pastoring in Montevideo, Minnesota. We had just returned from a mission’s trip in Honduras where our church had built a large feeding center in a city built around a dump. The poorest of the poor would now have access to a good meal at least a few times every week.
On arriving home, I discovered that our van wasn’t working right so I took it in to be repaired. We had also lost a hub cap somewhere, so I asked the shop to give me a price on a new one. Apparently our tires were not the normal size, so the hub cap would have to be special ordered and was going to cost about $80. I said, “No, thank you.” Sometimes a father of four has to sacrifice cosmetics.
The next day they called to tell me the van was ready and said they had found an identically matched hub cap that they were happy to give me and even put it on for free. I was overjoyed! God was taking care of a detail I hadn’t even asked Him about. Auto repair shops don’t usually do anything for free and yet the guy who called even seemed excited about giving us this hub cap. What a miracle!
They asked me to test drive the van to make sure the problem was solved, so I took it a mile up the road and back – it was fixed. I thanked them, paid them, and when I returned, noticed that the new hub cap was gone! “They must not have put it on right,” I reasoned to myself, and proceeded to go up and down the mile patch to find my hub cap. It was nowhere. I became so emotional about it that I had to pull over to the side of the road. I told the devil to get his hands off my hub cap! God gave it to me and I was contending for it! There were tears in my eyes.
Then it happened. A still small voice whispered a phrase clearly into my mind: “You are Jonah.” With this sentence came the truth that I was more upset over this hub cap than I had been about the poverty in Honduras; and I had experienced more joy when I thought God had given me the new hub cap than I had when we had completed the new feeding center. There was no accusation from God – it was just the truth.
“Then the Lord provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered…God said to Jonah, ‘Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?’ ‘I do,’ he said, ‘I am angry enough to die.’
“But the Lord said, ‘You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?'” Jonah 4:6-7; 9-11
The book of Jonah does not end with a scolding, but with God asking His own child a question that compared what Jonah was concerned about to what God was. God wants us to care more about what He cares for. He wants us to weep over eternal things instead of the insignificant things that relate to our own temporary discomfort. He wants our greatest joys to be in His redemption, not in our stuff.
If we will own the truth of where we are; repent, and ask for grace; He will enlarge our hearts to care more about things that matter, and less about things that don’t. Why don’t we make the old chorus our prayer: “Turn your eyes upon Jesus; look full in His wonderful face; and the things of earth, will grow strangely dim; in the light of His glory and grace.”
Oh, by the way, the Sunday afternoon after I told this story in Montevideo, a couple went out looking for the missing hub cap and found it!
Have you ever had something like this happen to you?
Tom Flaherty is the Lead Pastor of CityChurch in Madison, WI.
