So Much Like Jonah

We studied the Prophets in Bible study this spring and Jonah was up. I was feeling way down, swallowed up in the belly of my miserable grumpiness. Who knows over what. Oh wait, I remember...but it doesn't matter.
What matters is....

Oh the ways I am like Jonah!

Even when I know better, I still don't want to go to the person I am called to go too because it is just too hard to talk about hard things.

So, I run.

I think of my needs first.

I want God's mercy on my own terms.

I feel like I am being punished instead of pursued.

He has me, despite me. (Thank God for that!)

So the interesting thing to me about Jonah -the book- is the untidy ending. Jonah is angry. He is frustrated by God's mercy instead of blessed. If it is possible for God to be frustrated and still sinless, then I would have to say He sounds a little frustrated to me too. When He says to Jonah in the last verse of the book:

And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left—and much livestock?”(Jonah 4:11)

So the ending isn't clean but neither is life.
The ending leaves us wondering and waiting for someone who has the answers.
Someone whose compassion knows no bounds, whose concern for the lost is worth dying for.

God used Jonah to show us all how desperately we need His mercy. God also knew He would never run from the hard job of helping people understand what their right and left hands are doing.

So the untidy ending stands to remind us of man's humanity and of God's stubborn mercy.

A reminder I frequently need!