Brett was at the wheel of the car when a light showed up on the dashboard.  I pulled the car manual out of the glove box and proceeded to search for the definition of the light.  We breathed a sigh of relief when the book told us the symbol simply meant low tire pressure.   We would pull up to a gas station and put in some air.

The next morning Brett stepped out of the front door of our home and noticed the offending tire was now flatter than it’s companion tires.  It still seemed like a simple fix.  I would postpone grocery shopping til the afternoon and he would run the car into a tire repair shop and they would fix the leak.  After much searching the tire repair shop found a pinhole size leak, but they were unable to fix it because of where it was located on the tire.  It still seemed like a simple fix, until the tire man told Brett it would be $200 to replace the tire.

Brett decided to come home and do some research before he paid $200 for a single tire.  After several phone calls he found a shop with the tire we needed for $150.  He placed an order for the tire and the person at the other end of the phone assured him the tire would arrive by 10am the following morning.  The woman at the shop assured Brett they would call him to alert him of the arrival of the tires.  It all sounded so simple until…..

By 4pm the next day the tire repair shop still hadn’t called.  The shop was in a larger town about thirty minutes from where we live  so we had driven over early planning to do some grocery shopping while waiting on the shop to call us and tell us to bring our car in.  Finally Brett called the shop.  They did not have us scheduled, but they did have the tires.  We could come right on over since the shop was not busy at the moment.  We pulled up to the shop only to discover they were busy and understaffed.  One of the shops repairmen talked to Brett telling him that they could not replace just one tire because of the all-time, all-wheel drive system on the car.  Due to one small pin hole that could not be repaired in one tire we needed to replace all four of them.

Brett was not willing to part with the money for such a repair so he called the maker of our car and they confirmed that if we drove on one new tire and three slightly used tires it could ruin the all-wheel drive system.  Our simple problem had now become complicated.  We had begun our solution to a small hole in our tire with a trip to the gas station and now we were faced with replacing all four tires at $150 per tire.

When King Nebuchadnezzar discovered three young men who refused to follow his order to bow to an image of himself, I’m sure it seemed simple enough to solve his problem by carrying out his threat to throw them an intensely, blazing furnace.  But, can you imagine how what had once seemed so simple now became complicated?  The three young men who should have immediately been consumed by the fire were now walking in the flames and there weren’t just three, there were four!  And the fourth looked like a son of the gods! (Daniel 3:25)

Then the king called the men to come out of the furnace. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego emerged unharmed, with not even a hair on their heads singed or the smell of smoke on their clothing.

Needless to say, this made quite an impression on Nebuchadnezzar who declared,  “Praise be to the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who has sent his angel and rescued his servants! They trusted in him and defied the king’s command and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own God. (Daniel 3:28)

When  faced with the power of God, King Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged a power greater than his.  It seems simple enough to do when I read about someone else doing it, but when it boils right down to doing it myself, it becomes much more complicated to simply give up my will to follow the will of God.  My deeply ingrained need of self-preservation rises to the surface any time I am asked to cross my will to do the will of my Father in heaven.  What I need to practice so many times  day is to simply say, like Jesus did, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”  (Luke 22;42)