Rescue

I was so angry I couldn't look at her—my wife, whom I had vowed to love "in sickness and in health." The next day, the sense that I was in the wrong crept up on me, against my will. But saying that I was sorry felt like dying. So for another night, I went to sleep without saying anything.

After Jesus was born, some pagan worshippers arrived in Jerusalem. We call them wise men, but King Herod and the religious leaders saw them as a threat to their authority. Through Herod, the chief priests tell the wise men the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, but they don't walk the five miles themselves. In his mercy, God prompted pagans to travel across a desert so he could introduce them to Jesus.

My whole life, people have asked me, "Do you really think a whale could have swallowed Jonah? How could he have lived inside a fish for three days?" In 2021, a humpback whale "swallowed" Michael Packard (he was in its mouth for about thirty seconds). Then the whale spit him out. Now his friends call him "Jonah." It's a remarkable story, but it has no relationship to the book of Jonah. None. All the cartoons aside, we don't know that it was a whale, just a great fish. If we said "purposefully unidentified sea creature," we'd have a better understanding. Also, if it were customary for whales to swallow people, then we wouldn't think of this event was God's supernatural work.

During ten years of campus ministry, fundraising was never fun-raising, so I avoided it. But when I fell behind in my budget, I didn't blame my lack of effort. Instead of telling God, "I haven't done a good job caring for my donors or reaching out to new ones," I'd pray to God, "Please help me." Yet, in God's mercy and the generosity of many donors, my budget was always fully met. For over a decade of teaching people how to follow God, I often used prayer as a substitute for effort.

"Bless us Lord, rain down your blessings on us, we just ask you Lord to bless us." I didn't object to the prayer in a formal sense. I want God's blessings as much as anyone else. I cringed at the Christianese. But I stopped praying along when it became clear that we were only praying for God to bless us. Looking back on it, I felt spiritually superior to the person praying. I knew I would have prayed a better prayer.