Wendy J. Saxton

I had purposely avoided Bibles for over twenty years when I noticed the one sitting on the table. My husband brought it home after visiting his grandmother. I stared at if for several minutes before succumbing to its own silent gaze and picked it up. I surveyed the leather cover and ran my fingers over the thin, fragile pages before setting it down for another long look.

I once read the Bible. I once sought God. In the midst of unspeakable  circumstances, I cried out to God, felt His presence, and received His peace, but I attended a church that left me more wounded than I was when I got there.

I was just a kid who had little parental supervision and a church family that didn't know what to do with someone who threatened religious comfort levels. And so I ran. For twenty-three years I ran, all the while longing for validation and confused about the nature of God.

In spite of it all, here I am. Here we are. Grace introduced me to authentic Christianity by embracing me just as I am, then by placing people in my life who frustrate and infuriate me. By asking me to live the impossible . . . to love those I sentenced to unlovable, just as Christ loved unlovable me. There are days when that love is sweet and outwardly giving. Other times, it's tough, but honoring, always requiring of me painstaking vulnerability.

We have all failed at some point in our lives. We have regrets for what we could've done, but didn't. Feelings of guilt for what we should've done, but couldn't. And through it all there is a sovereign God, hovering, as it says in the book of Genesis, over the darkness--always God, always there. To live and die without awakening to this truth is human tragedy.To go to church every Sunday and not take the time to see our very own lives in some way reflected and played out in the pages of the Bible is to refuse the hope of something new, something beautiful.

The Bible, after all, is a book about real people, experiencing real relationships, and a real God who reaches out to us in practical ways. Who of us can resist that forever? Not me, which is why I eventually opened it that day, never to close my heart again.

Several Bible stories and one heart-wrenching year of healing later, I found myself in the book of Jonah, one of the smallest stories in the Bible. A story many think of as a children's tale--about a man named Jonah who was swallowed by a whale, then spent three days and nights in its belly before being spit out of its mouth and given a second chance to obey God. Color the whale picture, eat your animal crackers, drink your juice; now go on home and we'll see you next Sunday.

But the story of Jonah and the whale holds far greater significance. You see, Jonah is a prophet, found in the Old Testament, who was asked by God to return to the city of Nineveh and proclaim a message of forgiveness to its residents providing that they turn from their wicked ways. That doesn't sound unreasonable unless you happen to be a man who suffered along with his people under the cruelty of Nineveh by order of their king. And Jonah was.

He couldn't bear to see his enemies forgiven, so he boarded a ship with plans to sail far away from a place that had only caused him pain. My own personal "Nineveh" represents several enemies of my past: The one responsible for my childhood victimization, an alcoholic father, a once drug-addicted husband, and the legalistic, judgmental church of my youth. Like Jonah, I didn't want to revisit those painful places and extend mercy to my enemies.

I, too, responded by running. I avoided God, whose merciful hand is as much for the harmful as the hurting. That was something I couldn't comprehend. And yet, God does not give up on us no matter how far we run or where we hide. He pursued Jonah through the power of a storm...

Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. (Jonah 1:4-5) 

I didn't board a ship and sleep through a storm. Instead I hid inside man-made shelters that numbed the pain of the truth I denied. I worked longer hours, abused alcohol, exercised compulsively, over-committed, and got into unhealthy relationships.

And then life became unmanageable.

Jonah was eventually thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale. Today we call that rock bottom, and though I've never been trapped inside the belly of a whale, I can certainly relate to life's dark pits that offer no way out.

The only way out of the dark is to cry out to the Light, because second chances are extended through humble requests. Jonah was enabled to overcome his painful past and so was I. Along the way we both discovered a loving, validating God, whose mercy in our weakness empowered us to victoriously walk through when we felt like walking out.

God's love humbled me to see a reflection of myself when I looked into the life of Jonah. I saw a victim of cruelty, a codependent sailor (we'll get to that later), an all consuming whale, an unmerciful leader who damaged other people, a violent and destructive storm, and the beauty of an ocean sunrise after a raging sea grows calm. All that from one of the smallest books in the Bible. Now that's effective storytelling. Imagine what God can reveal to us through the rest of His word.

Thanks be unto God, for His merciful hand and unfailing commitment to love me--all of me, and for the opportunity to tell you a story.