Ananias and the no-good very-bad week

It was getting late but my seven-year-old demanded the ritual even though he had been up much of the previous night at a sleepover: he wanted me to read him a Bible story.

It had been a long week in which I suspected I had an invisible target on my back. A colleague had unfairly blasted me in an e-mail, I had stooped to a petty fight with my mother, our flower pots had been kicked over, my husband was still recuperating from pneumonia, and a total stranger had screamed at me for allowing my young son to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk.

But a Bible story it was. My husband and I are delighted at how our children have responded to the Bible – with eagerness at the stories that reveal God, with admiration or loathing for different figures, and with a sense of how they fit into the story.

Tonight was Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. I like that our kids are getting to know the Bible well enough to ask “which Saul?” and later “oh – that one.” For me, what stood out tonight was Ananias.

Ananias was a faithful follower of Christ who lived in Damascus during a time of violent persecution of Christians. Lucky Ananias received a call from God to restore sight to the head persecutor Saul!

What struck me were the tremendous similarities, and differences, between Ananias’s call and Jonah’s. In both cases, the Lord asked them to do something they really didn’t want to do, something they considered abhorrent. In both cases, God wanted to extend mercy to people they rightly considered evil and deserving of judgment.

But, Ananias chose to respond differently to God’s call than Jonah.

The key was dialogue with God. I flipped back in my son’s Bible to read about Jonah with him, to see the parallel story. When God called Jonah to preach to Nineveh, Jonah was aghast at the idea, turning and going in the opposite direction. Ananias was similarly appalled by the call to offer healing to Saul, but he wrestled it out with God, with “reminders” who this was that God was asking him to help.

I doubt that Ananias thought God was unaware of Saul’s identity, but he needed to tell God why he didn’t want to go. Jonah’s response after he finally obeyed God was, “I knew this would happen! I knew you would show mercy!” In light of Ananias’s response, I wish Jonah had had the courage and intimacy with God to offer this protest when God first called him. At least one large fish would have been spared indigestion.

Wrestling with God is so much better than stewing on our own. God can undoubtedly take anger, complaints, pain and reasons. Occasionally, as my seven-year-old and I noted, God can even be persuaded to change a course of action – such as Aaron speaking to the Israelites after Moses protested his own lack of skill.

But more than changing God’s mind, prayer can change our perspective. We begin to see that the safest place in the universe is the centre of God’s will, that God has placed us precisely at the right place at the right time, that God can make all things well and will go with us into difficult situations.

Ananias and the late night Bible story informed my no-good, very-bad week. I began to pray for those who had attacked me this week, to consider whether I had been a peacemaker in these situations, and to turn my feelings over to God.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the boy who offered his loaves and fishes to Jesus, and how Jesus was able to multiply his insufficiency into abundance. That’s what a life rendered to God in prayer becomes too. It is broken toward wider abundance instead of turning away from God and the blessings of obedience.

Susan Fish is a writer, mother and member of Kitchener (Ont.) MB Church. She is writing this column every other issue during 2005.