~You had a bad day at school/work
~Your parents yelled at you
~Your boyfriend/girlfriend was a jerk
~Your friends seem to just not care
~Everything in the universe seems to be aligning against you
~Nothing in your closet fits/looks good
Then it happens. You walk to the mirror see yourself, look long and hard and every bad moment or thing that could pop up does. Now you have a river streaming down your face and all it does is get worse. You can't stop at all. That one person who could possibly make it better seems to call at just the right time and you try to answer hiding the fact that you are watering your room with your own tears. They try to make it better and you act better when you hang up but then there is that stupid mirror again, and the river starts streaming again. You ball up on your bed or couch with a pillow, watch the mascara stream down your face and stain your pillow (and if you are a guy I know you are reading this completely agreeing with me) and find the best comfort food you can find and indulge because of course that tub of ice cream is going to solve all!
My biggest question at the table with Christ is why in HECK do I ever have to feel like this? You are in my life, I am facing you right now and yet here I am with a freaking river running down my face! Aren’t you supposed to be making my life all happy and cheery once I turned my chair and decided to live with you at the center of my life? I feel like we as Christians are sometimes afraid to say this disappointment out loud and ask this question. But when we talk to non-believers they aren’t shy at all to say a statement like this. So we tuck it inside so we can live the “Christian” life and just throw away the pillow case so no one knows that we too have moments like this. But what if we didn’t throw away the pillow case and were ok with the fact that we are going to have moments like this? What if our moments like these our pillow was God? And what if that person we saw in the mirror was the one who Jesus fell in love with the moment he created you?
Jonah is more than our fun loving Veggie tale movie but a great source for us living in relationship with Christ when we are feeling bad for ourselves. Here is bullet points leading to the story we want to look at…
• Jonah was given a task to go and preach
• Jonah decided he didn’t want to go so he jumped on a boat
• A bad storm came that threatened the life of everyone because of Jonah
• They threw Jonah in the ocean
• Jonah was eaten by a big yellow fish
Ok timeout… Eaten by a huge fish and able to survive in the fish? First off how do you get the fish smell off of you and that is probably the best timeout I have ever heard for somebody. You thought having to sit on the chair in the corner for hours was bad. Jonah was in a Fish! I guarantee if you gave my mom the option of timeout in a fish where she knew I would be fine and alive, she would have been the first one to sign up!
Anyways, after 3 long days, inside a fish may I add again, God made the fish cough him up (there is a lot more to this then just a simple cough) and sent him back to the city of Nineveh where Jonah preached about God and that the city was going to be overthrown in 40 days if wickedness did not change. The king demanded that they all call on God and ask for forgiveness. Because they had changed their evil ways God spared the city. Jonah thought that God was wrong and he was angry that he had come all this way, preached what he was told and now everything he said was just gone. He was so disappointed that he did not want to live any longer. And Gods response “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Jonah moved to the outskirts of town where he could watch the city and God placed a plant there giving him a little shade. But the next night God sent a worm that ate the plant. So again Jonah told the lord that he no longer wanted to live. And Gods response was “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” Jonah’s reply simply was “It is!”
But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11 And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:1-10)
In our “poor me, my life is horrible!” moments, we blame everyone and everything. We think that there is nothing that could make any of it better. But actually he is giving us a plant that we will have to put some work into. In any relationship that you encounter in life when there is only one of you working on it is setup for failure. He knows that we are human and that there are going to be times that we are going to curl up and exit the world but we shouldn’t doubt him. And when we do he doesn’t pack up and leave, in fact he is still there with us. It is hard to look at the bright side of things during these times and when someone (like your mother who always seems to do this) listing them all it almost seems to make it worse. But what if in these moments just turned to God and said “I am going to have a poor me moment, would you just be with me?”, “You know I just don’t want to be ok right now, so I am going to eat this amazing tub of ice cream God made just for me!”, or simply “you know I love you God but right now I am a little lost…” Guess what YOU ARE OK FOR SAYING THIS TO HIM!!! In fact he already knows it when we say this we are telling ourselves and reminding ourselves of the God we choose to have in our lives. Not your parents, friends or grandparents… You.
I my girls a challenge, an easy challenge. Write Jonah’s name somewhere you would see it during these poor me moments. Use your lipstick and write it on your mirror, put it in your journal, collage it out of magazines, put it on your fridge, etc. You will notice it at first but as the days go by you will forget that it is even there but the moment that river starts flowing down your face it is going to stand out like a sore thumb. It isn’t going to make you stop but it will remind you that God is there and has not forgotten about you.
