dar334

Granted, I’ve often almost pondered myself right in to the nut house, or even the grave.  My pondering has even caused my imagine to run rampant and caused unimaginable dreams.  I can not watch scary movies.  My pondering on them will send my imagination out of control, rendering nights in which I can’t sleep or nightmares if I do.  I once asked our son how he could watch such things and he told me because he watches them knowing they are not real.  Doesn’t work for me.  I’m a lover of the 30 minutes sitcom.  Last night my pondering kept me awake and I was still pondering when I woke up this morning.

At the women’s study last night of Jonah, we were posed with the question of why Jonah wanted to run from the job God asked him to do.  Again, it doesn’t take a Bible thumper to know Jonah was swallowed by a whale.   Jonah was a prophet.  God asked him to go to Ninevah to preach to the Assyrians who were nasty people that inflicted physical and psychological terror on their enemies, and God’s people, the Israelites, were their enemies.   Jonah didn’t want to go, he would have been just fine with God just letting them fall off the face of the earth.  Instead of obeying, Jonah ran.  He ran to Joppa where he boarded a ship to sail as far away from the presence of God as he could.  Once out to sea, God caused a great storm that threatened to cause everyone on the boat to perish at sea.  The sailors believed in gods that had a specific purposes, not in the one true God.  Their prayers were unanswered so they went to Jonah so he would plead their case to his God.  Long story short, they threw him overboard and the seas calmed immediately.  As Jonah was sinking to the bottom of the sea, a big fish swallowed him.  I found out last night that nowhere in scripture does it say a whale, apparently that’s the biggest fish anybody could think of when they read the story.  He lived in the belly of the big fish for 3 days, during which he went to God in prayer.  (Jesus was in the tomb for 3 days too remember).  God responded to Jonah’s prayer by having the big fish vomit Jonah up on dry land, Jonah obeyed and went to Ninevah and preached to the people.  The Ninevites repented, accepted God and were saved.  Jonah wasn’t happy.

Where my pondering caused trouble was that somewhere I had read that perhaps one of the reasons Jonah disliked the Ninevites so much was they could have killed his parents when he was just a child.  If you see your parents killed in front of you, and then God asks you to go to the ones that killed them and preach so they can be saved,  you would want to get as far away as you could too.  The women sitting beside me thought that sounded familiar to her, but others looked at me like I had flipped my wig.  Granted, I do read several different scriptures a day, and when they refer to another scripture I often read that one too.  I’m constantly confused on what I read where and who exactly it was speaking of.  In this case, the fact that Jonah’s parents could have possibly been killed by Ninevites was clear in my head, but I couldn’t put my finger on where or when I had read that.  I brought my study manual to work this morning and was able to locate where I had read it, and let everyone know via a message through Facebook.  Just so they knew I had not flipped my wig after all.  Score one for me.

Moral of the story, you can’t run from God.  And when you do, you better be ready to suffer the consequences.

Always pondering,

dar