Oh, Jonah, when you thought you were running from God, God ran to you!

AM Psalm 119:1-24 • PM Psalm 12, 13, 14
Jonah 1:17-2:10 • Acts 27:9-26 • Luke 9:1-17

Or maybe the title should be…we seem to spend our time running from what God wants from us until we get ourselves into a “fix” and then we are all about asking God to help us.  

Think about the last time you got yourself thrown into the raging sea (of course not literally). We seem to sometimes work harder running from God than running into God’s almighty arms. We fight what God asks of us. What does God ask of us? To love God with all our heart, mind, strength, and soul. What does that entail? Listening to the plan God has for us and obeying God’s call. All we need to do is look to Abraham, Moses, Nehemiah and of course Jesus Christ to see that obedience to God is not an easy task.  

However, we are ever like Jonah we run from and then we turn back toward God. Isn’t that repentance? The Lord provided a large fish to shallow up Jonah. God gave him three days to sit in the fish’s belly to think about what he had done. Jonah realizes as we should too the God that Jonah was fleeing from was now his only hope for survival.

“I called to the Lord out of my distress, and He answered me.” The God of compassion and mercy wants only for us to love God. To recognize that in our distress He is always there with us even when we are sitting in the belly of the fish, our darkness, our despair.

As Jonah said, “As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you”. And then the fish spews with great gusto and we find ourselves in the light once more and we are so very thankful. Always thankful, praying that we will do better next time. And hopefully, next time we will recognize God’s hand in our lives and make the choice to obey God not end up in the belly of a fish again. But it’s okay if we do, God will come to us as God did to Jonah and rescue us once again.

Written by Chris Schaefer

Working to follow what God has planned for me and spending less time in the belly of the fish!