Angry with Love

First off, I want to apologize for recently dropping off the face of the blogging earth. I know I had been doing this daily and then suddenly stopped, but I should be back in business for a while, given that I'm now officially on Christmas break from school. The reason I stopped was due to finals until Friday; since then I've been having so much great fellowship with Christians who are back home that I simply haven't set aside time for blogging! It's a great situation actually. There's clearly a bond that we have, and it's founded on Biblical truth. We've been spreading God's gospel together at Westfield mall and constantly sharing meals and encouragement with each other. I love it.

Today's reading comes from Jonah! Slap me if I've already blogged about this, but not too hard because I think it deserves to be said again if I have. If you haven't read Jonah, you should do so. It's short enough to read all of it in like 5 minutes. Since most who read this blog will probably already know the gist of the story of Jonah, I'm just going to skip that part. After Jonah finally turns from his sin of directly running from God's will to obeying it by preaching a message of repentance to Nineveh, Nineveh actually heeds Jonah's words and repents, all the way up to the king! Because of this, God relents of the disaster that He meant to give them.

And Jonah gets angry! Listen to this crazy complaint from Jonah 4: "¹But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. ²He prayed to the LORD, "O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. ³Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live." Whoa! Isn't this crazy? God is so amazingly merciful that he gets on a prophet's nerves! And that is good news for me. Really good news.