It’s not always easy to see ourselves as we truly are. But stories can help. When we listen carefully to a story that is authentic to the human experience, we come to know ourselves in new ways.

The book of Jonah is one such story. Despite its rather fantastical qualities, the story of Jonah is a real human tale. A story of human failure and divine grace, a story of the interplay between duty observed and plain disobedience. A story of the internal conflict between authentic honesty and dishonest selfishness. It’s all here, all of the meaning and the mess of life.

But the thing that makes Jonah’s story most helpful to us is how everything, all of it, is placed before God. And really, this is the thing most true about our humanity, the thing we most need to educate our imaginations with: there is no other kind of life except that which is lived before God.

Jonah is not a children’s tale. It is a very grown up tale that ends with a very serious question: what kind of person will you be?

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