“In trouble, deep trouble, I prayed to God. He answered me. From the belly of the grave I cried, “Help!” You heard my cry (Jonah 2:2 MSG).

To get off on the right foot, I humbly acknowledge that just now I didn’t know where to locate Jonah in my Bible.

Although I knew the story… didn’t I? I’d heard it as a kid, I’d read it to my own kids, surely I’d heard sermons on it. I’d even experienced the fantastic Sight and Sound Theatre production of it in Pennsylvania.

Well, it turns out we can be sure we know something and be wrong. In fact, I’m not sure we can be truly humble unless we’ve had something we absolutely knew to be true be proven untrue.

I didn’t know where to look in my Bible because I never related Jonah to prophets the likes of Isaiah—upstanding types who straightaway delivered God’s messages. Yet Jonah is right there with the other prophets—a signal that God knew it would take a far-out story with a big ouch-factor to get this particular message across. 

Even if, like me, you have to search for Jonah, our searching can’t end when we find the book. What must end there, though, is our insistence that we already know the story. When that insistence ends, we have made room for God to show us where being absolutely sure we have the truth gets us.

It seems that today we live in a new era of people’s heightened insistence that they (we) know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The truth is that such insistence is nothing new. It is the propensity that has led to Jonah-style choices within nations, communities, families, and individuals for millennia.

Jonah’s insistence that he knew better than God led to quite the journey.  It is appropriate that we shake our heads and even chuckle at his choices. They led him to a prayer time in a fish’s belly, for pete’s sake.

It was there, though, that Jonah woke up to what he had done. Likewise, it is in some extremely tight and uncomfortable places that we, too, wake up to what we have done. 

We have ruined a relationship, caused turmoil in a family or among friends, contributed to division in a community or nation, or messed up our own physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being by being absolutely sure we were right.

Keeping in mind humility is hard to come by, let’s take a deep breath, settle into that tight uncomfortable space, and ask God to show us how we have been acting like Jonah. When God hears such a prayer, He starts us on a journey that will eventually lead us to humility—a restful, trusting place in God where His respect for people becomes ours. The journey may be hard, but the destination will be worth it.