There is a scene in Fawlty Towers when Basil loses it with his car because it won’t start. He threatens it with a good thrashing before going to get a branch from a nearby tree and hitting it. If you’ve not seen it, I’ve included a link at the bottom of this post.
I didn’t come close to Basil’s rage but I was heading in that direction yesterday. I was at church trying to print something and it wouldn’t work. The laptop was sending the document, the printer was plugged in and powered up but I kept getting an error message. I was getting frustrated and then I saw the problem, the laptop was trying to send the document to the printer at home!
A few days ago when I installed the drivers for our new home printer it had made it the default printer for my laptop. Once I understood the problem it was easily fixed and the printer was saved from the thrashing I thought it deserved. My printer was innocent, the problem was with the new shiny printer on the block who had told my computer to send everything to it. Sometimes we blame things and people which aren’t really at fault and in doing so we ignore the real problem.
Do we ever blame God unfairly? We can try everything to solve our problems except God, but when things get worse we can then wrongly blame God rather than the things that didn’t work. When we expect people, strategies, technology or the media to provide all of the answers for life it is like trying to print to an out of range printer, it just doesn’t work because they can’t deliver.
We can connect to and put our trust in the all-powerful God who loves us, so why don’t we do this more consistently? God can work through the other things I have mentioned but ultimately he is the person who we need.
Will we trust in God today?
