“But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish.” – Jonah 1:3
Have you ever run away from something unpleasant you needed to do? I suspect, if we are honest with ourselves, we all have had our Jonah moments. A common one might be avoiding going to the doctor when we really need to get checked out. Even at my age when doctors’ visits occupy more and more of my schedule, I’m still tempted to turn and run the other way, and would if I could. Except there is a second part of the Jonah story that prevents that from happening, a giant fish that first rescues him, then swims off in the direction Jonah should have been going in the first place, sort of like my wife putting me in the car and pointing it in the direction of the doctor’s office, whether I like it or not.
We all have Jonah stories in which we try to run away, sometimes in a dangerous direction, only to be rescued and pointed back in the right direction. I remember sometime after going off to college suddenly rebelling against the more or less straight-and-narrow life I had been living, veering off in the wrong direction. I’m not sure what I was rebelling against – not knowing what I wanted to do with my life perhaps, or simply not wanting to grow up. Then, after being off course for a period of time, one day I received a letter in the mail from a man who had been sort of a second father to me. His brief note, no more than three or four sentences, was like that giant fish that swallowed Jonah. Except, while Jonah only spent three days inside that fish’s belly, I continued to wander for several months, until my life began to slowly steer back in the right direction.
I’ve often thought of the story of Jonah as one of the great comedies in the Bible. The absurdity of a man being swallowed by a fish and actually living inside the fish’s belly for three days seems more like a fairy tale that belongs in a collection from Mother Goose or Dr. Seuss than sacred scripture. I laugh every time I read it – a giant fish swimming along out of nowhere and swallowing up that runaway buffoon Jonah.
That is, until I go back to the beginning where it says, “But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish.” Suddenly the story becomes personal because I’ve been there and done that. Then I received the note from the man whose words swallowed me up like that giant fish and pointed me back in the right direction. Now the big question becomes, if I’ve been Jonah, how can I pay it forward by being someone else’s big fish?