The book of Jonah is a story I read with discomfort every time. Jonah seems determined to do the exact opposite of whatever he’s meant to be doing. And even when he does do what’s asked of him he drags his feet and complains the entire time. It’s like watching a petulelant child go on a road trip with God.
Near the end of Jonah’s story, he’s on a roll. After trying to run away from God he’s gone to Ninevah as he was meant to and preached God’s message. Then the city responds overwhelmingly to his message and repents, which Jonah resents because he was (in his mind) there to give them a last warning before he saw them oblitarated. His work done, Jonah goes to high ground outside the city to watch and see if the city will in fact be destroyed. That’s where a tree enters the story.
“And the Lord God arranged for a leafy plant to grow there, and soon it spread its broad leaves over Jonah’s head, shading him from the sun. This eased his discomfort, and Jonah was very grateful for the plant. But God also arranged for a worm. The next morning at dawn the worm ate through the stem of the plant so that it withered away. And as the sun grew hot, God arranged for a scorching east wind to blow on Jonah. The sun beat down on his head until he grew faint and wished to die. “Death is certainly better than living like this!” he exclaimed. Then God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry because the plant died?” “Yes,” Jonah retorted, “even angry enough to die!”” (Jonah 4:6-9)
Whenever I read this, my first response is to absolutely scoff at Jonah and his temper tantrum. I mean, really. Your shade dies and you throw an absolute fit? Such a fit that you claim you want to die? What is your problem?
But how often do we react the same way? How often do we completely lose our cool when just one more thing goes wrong? We scoff at Jonah, but we do the same thing all the time. Maybe we don’t react with anger, but we are so quick to break down when things don’t go our way.
For me, this shows up as a sort of despair. The other day I’d had a long day at work. Everything that could have gone wrong did and I was exhausted. All day long I’d comforted myself by imagining the dinner I was going to make when I got home. It became the picture in my mind that helped me shake off the stress, and there had been a lot of stress. But when I got home and opened my cupboard, I found I didn’t have a crucial ingredient I needed for my dinner. I sat down right there on the kitchen floor and had a cry.
Now I didn’t go as far as claiming I wished I was dead and I’m not saying that the cry in itself was a bad thing. But the problem lay in how quickly I leapt to thinking “Are you seeing this, God? Really? Did I really need one more thing to go wrong?” In short, I went full Jonah. It wasn’t a minor inconvenience, it was the damning evidence that I’d been let down and deserved to feel sorry for myself.
Like Jonah, the missing ingredient wasn’t the whole picture. Jonah’s tantrum didn’t start when the shade withered. There were a thousand clues to Jonah’s attitude long before he even sat down under the shade. The tantrum isn’t the diagnoses, it’s a symptom of a bigger problem.
Attitude is a far bigger problem than inconvenience.
Jonah had a bad attitude so an inconvenience broke him. It wasn’t that the inconvenience was so bad as all that. He had let his attitude get so bad that it couldn’t handle even the slightest disturbance. That’s the danger we walk with our own attitudes. The tantrum isn’t our downfall, it’s the result of a downfall that began far before that moment. It is a reflection of our attitude toward the problem.
If we want to avoid being a bunch of Jonahs, losing it at the smallest thing, we need to carefully guard our hearts and attitudes. And how do we do that? A simple place to start is by bringing God more into our thoughts when our attitudes and problems are small. Just talking to him. It’s that simple and that huge.
Praying when we feel our attitude slipping is the quickest way to start arresting its momentum. God is ready to lend us his attitude and solutions towards our problems and inconveniences. Making him part of the conversation makes him part of the solution. We so often cry out to God for our big problems that sometimes we forget to bring him our problems when they’re small too. Make God a part of the journey every step of the way and you guard yourself against hysteric despair.
We also protect ourselves from spiritual tantrums by acknowledging that we’re prone to them. The biggest struggles in our lives are the ones we don’t admit to or don’t own. The sooner we own a struggle, the sooner we can get to handling it. How different would things have been if Jonah had been policing his attitude the whole time he was in Ninevah and taking it to God? Two simple actions that could have kept him from completely losing his cool and wishing he were dead.
Bad days happen. Bad weeks happen. But we don’t have to be ruled by those bad moments. God wants bigger things for us than our low moments. Life is so much more than a moment of withered shade.
Let’s find some joy,
A
Avalon Robinson Author 