Man In A Hurry

The Mayberry Way

Have you ever had one of those days when something goes wrong, and you decide you are going to fix it yourself? Maybe the washing machine stops working. At first, it is simple. You check the plug. You flip the breaker. You turn the knob back and forth a few times like somehow the machine just needed a little encouragement. Nothing. So then you do what people do now—you get your phone out and start looking up videos. Five minutes later, somebody on YouTube has convinced you that the problem is probably one little switch behind the control panel. And he makes it look easy.

“Just remove these two screws.” Well, his screws come right out. Yours were installed sometime during the Eisenhower administration. Now you are digging through three different drawers looking for another screwdriver. Thirty minutes later, you have the top off the washing machine, four screws on the floor that you are pretty sure are important, one plastic clip broken in half, and the washing machine is somehow in worse shape than when you started. But you are committed now. Because there comes a point when it is no longer about fixing the washing machine.

Now it is personal. You are not going to let this machine beat you. Your spouse comes in and says, “Why don’t you just call somebody?” And somehow that sounds insulting. “I know what I’m doing.” You do not know what you are doing. But that is beside the point. So you keep going. Another video. Another tool. Another part removed. And somewhere along the way, you stop trying to solve the problem and start trying to prove that you are still in control. We do that with a lot more than washing machines. Something happens in our family, and we start trying to manage everybody involved.

Something happens with our health, and we start reading everything we can find, trying to figure out every possible outcome before the doctor even calls. Something goes wrong at work, and we start rehearsing every conversation that might happen. Something happens with our children, and we begin trying to arrange every detail of their lives so nothing else can go wrong. We pray about it. But then, almost immediately, we start helping God. We pray, “Lord, I’m giving this to You.” And five minutes later, we have taken it back. We make another phone call. We send another text. We come up with another plan. We try another door. And when that does not work, we try another one.

Because one of the hardest things for us to admit is that there are some things in life we simply cannot control. And there are moments when all of our fixing, planning, worrying, pushing, and forcing only leaves us more frustrated than we were when the problem began. Sometimes the thing we are trying hardest to control is the very thing that reminds us—we were never in control to begin with.

In the Andy Griffith episode “Man in a Hurry,” Malcolm Tucker is a businessman from Charlotte who finds himself stranded just outside Mayberry when his car breaks down on a Sunday. He has somewhere to be, business to handle, and absolutely no intention of slowing down. But Mayberry does not operate on Malcolm’s schedule. Wally will not work on Sunday, Gomer only does gas and air but cannot fix the car, the telephone line is tied up, and every solution Malcolm reaches for fall apart. The harder he tries to take control of the situation, the more frustrated he becomes. To Malcolm, the problem seems obvious: his car is broken, and if somebody would just fix it, everything would be all right.

We often assume that if we pray enough, believe enough or live well enough that our prayers will be answered, God will give us what we need and ask for and that will be that. We often treat God like a genie in a bottle that we can just wish our problems away and we will get through all the struggles in life. All is great when that works but it’s when it doesn’t that we have a problem. When we come to God and we’re hurting and we’ve done all we can do and we take our problem to God trusting that He will answer our prayers, that we will be healed from whatever it is that we’re going through and God says no, we become frustrated, we start asking questions, maybe even question our faith and everything and everyone around us.

This is what Malcolm in our story is doing. He’s frustrated, nothing is going his way and he thinks that the more upset he gets, the louder he talks, the more people he calls on for help that he can essentially fix the problem himself. He believes that he has the power to deliver himself from his current state, that he has the know how, he’s intelligent enough and he’s maybe even used to getting his way in life. That isn’t the case here, it may not be the case for you in what you’re facing in your life. We often seek another solution, another person, another way out. Malcom eventually steals Gomer’s truck to get to where he needs to be, how many times have we sought the same things? What trucks do we steal when God doesn’t move fast enough for us, or doesn’t give us the answer we think we should have?

What happens when God says no? Paul prayed three times for God to take away the thorn from his flesh. It is most often assumed from some of his other writings that he developed an eye condition later in his life. If you’ll remember, he was blinded for three days when he met Jesus on his way to Damascus, this could be the reason he had this condition in his life, and the reason is not what is important, what is important is that he struggles with it now. He’s tired of it, it hurts him either physically, emotionally or spiritually. We can recognize that, we have those things in our own life and we can get to a point that we don’t know what to do and we struggle. We may try to fix the problem ourself, maybe we take it to God in prayer and frustrate ourselves when nothing happens and we realize that there is nothing we can do to fix it.

Paul offers a three part or three fold prayer and this is not new, Jesus had a three fold prayer himself in the garden. Jesus prayed three times for cup to pass from Him, He prayed that there was another way out so He doesn’t have to go to the cross. He goes to His father in heaven and prays for God to take that away and He was told no. I want you to see this and what is happening here, there are times when the prayers we offer to God are overruled. Neither Jesus nor Paul had their prayer answered, didn’t get what they requested and that makes us focus on the fact that sometimes God says no. He doesn’t say no because He doesn’t care about you or love you. Malcolm thought that no one care about him or his problem. It could be that he knows more about the situation than you do, he knows what’s coming next that you have to be prepared for and this current state you’re in gets you ready for that next stage of life. I believe what bothers us most is the fact that it’s more than God saying no, it’s the fact we don’t like losing control of our life. The issue with Malcolm, the thing that I want you to see is, the problem was never about the car, that isn’t what the episode is about, it was about him.

He believed if he could just get his car fixed everything would be alright. We believe the same things at times don’t we? If God will only give me this one thing then all will be okay. If God will only change who I am, things will be okay. If God will remove this pain that I have I will have peace finally and become so focused on those things that we lose sight of what God is already doing in our lives and how He has always been there. If mentioned to you before that I want you to look back at your life, at all you’ve been through, all those tough times you didn’t believe you would make it through and yet here you are. You made it through everything sent to attack you. Not because you were strong enough, but God was. Every experience of God’s faithfulness gives us another reason to trust Him when the next storm hits, and there will be another one. And in each storm we keep asking God to fix the problem while God may be trying to show us Him in the problem. When you think about some of the storms in our lives, just like the physical storms we experience, they blow in and they blow out, the storms eventually lose their power.

Now in the episode, Malcolm’s car was eventually fixed but by that time something strange happened, he doesn’t care about the car anymore. The thing that was ruining his life no longer mattered, no longer controlled him. The car had been broken but Malcolm wasn’t broken by it. Now, the car will probably break again but now he knows how to handle it, how to look at and deal with it in a healthy way and the reason for that is now he finally sees what had been around him the whole time, people that cared for him, a place he could stop. Peace, community, grace. The people around him represented grace surrounding a man who was initially too focused on his problem to recognize it. And now, Paul suddenly makes sense. The thorn did not change. Paul did.

At Gethsemane, Jesus asks for the cup to pass from Him but the cup remains. Jesus rises and says to His disciples, “Rise! Let us go! The cup did not change but Jesus got up and walked toward it. This is what grace does, it may not remove the storm but it allows us to stand up in it, strength not only to face it but walk toward it. Jesus promises us strength for today no matter what today may bring and tomorrow, there will be grace. Your pain is real but so is God’s grace.

So what do we do when God says no? We pray and then we obey. Faith is not seeing everything that God is going to do, it is trusting that He is going to see us through it, to control what we cannot. We ask for patience when we don’t understand. We pray for strength when we, like Malcolm, want to steal a truck and try to fix the problem ourself, we let Him guide us instead of constantly trying to direct Him and we can try three things: we can look back to remember what God has done and brought you through. We look around us, look at the grace that is already surrounding you. Look ahead, not because you know what tomorrow holds, but because you know who goes with you.

I life we’re going to get knocked down, thorns come and go, some thorns stay forever. The promise of the gospel is not that every problem will be fixed before sundown. The promise is that no unresolved problem can exhaust the grace of God. There will be times in your life when you think you’re alone, at your lowest and you may not feel that grace in your life. You may think that it’s unfair that you are being treated this way, or your prayers aren’t answered the way you like and your faith will be tested.

Paul asked for the thorn to be removed from him so he could be a better servant of God because he thought that is what he needed and he was overruled. You may ask the same things, pray for healing for someone you love, you open your Bible and you pray for the person you love to be healed and the die right in front of you, that can test your faith. Praying for a job and bills keep rolling in, that can test your faith. It can make us question, it can make us angry with God, but if it happened to the man that wrote the Bible maybe we should be a little more understanding of what God is doing in our lives.

And when the thorn is still there tomorrow - you rise! Not because everything is fixed, or the diagnosis has changed. Not because the relationship suddenly healed, not because the cup disappeared. Rise because God is still us. Paul discovered it. Jesus demonstrated it. Malcolm, in his own little Mayberry way, experienced something like it. Sometimes God fixes the car, sometimes He doesn’t but either way, grace can change the person sitting behind the wheel. Faith is not believing God will always give us what we want. Faith is trusting God when He doesn’t. The thorns may remain, but so does God.