Jonah

I love the story of Jonah, although I think that teaching this lesson to a group of children in Sunday School might be hard now. The whole class probably speaks whale. The story of Jonah is so much bigger than the whale, that was just 3 days in his life. A scary 3 days, but he didn't die there.

This picture is one of my all time favorites. It's really nothing special, just legs. It's the graphic used in Mark's Newspring Church sermon series fall of 2008 about Jonah titled "Running". I love this picture for so many reasons. I know and love the legs, (and the rest of the man). I know and love the photographer and his family. I know and love the church where it was used, representing four sermons; Running from God, Running to God, Running with God, Running ahead of God.My husband (the legs) graduated from Bible College this last summer. In one of his classes he was talking to his professor and described himself as a modern Jonah. He felt God's call on his life at 18, but ran the other direction. Then because of choices he'd made and the repercussions of sin in his life, he let that calling go. This sermon series after Steve made that comment made it even more powerful to me.Steve ran from God twenty years ago. He ran to God a long time ago. But the running with God took longer. Five years ago Steve and I entered the most difficult and challenging time of our lives, (lives that have never been easy). Some of the trials were recurring consequences to decisions we had made in our past as some decisions mark you for life. Some of the trials were because life is hard. You didn't do anything to be in that storm, you can't make it stop. You just have to ride it out (or throw someone overboard). Steve came home one afternoon and said he'd had lunch with our pastor, Mark. They had talked about Steve still feeling that call on his life, but he felt that it was too late. He had rejected it. Mark told him the same thing that day that he said in Running from God. If you don't answer the call when it's made, you won't get a different one, you get the same one again. We don't get to choose. Fortunately, if we do as he says, we will find that we are so much happier and figure it out that God really does know better than we do. So Steve started following God's lead and began Running with God (and drug me with him). We are Running with God. It's not easy, it's a daily, minute by minute effort to live for God. Satan wants to defeat us, and he derailed Steve once, but he's not going to again. Now we want to stay with God and not Run ahead. God knows what he has for us and he knows the timing.