in the belly of the fish.

For Jonah.

We named you for a story about a man who tried to run from the One who we call God. I want you to know that you are allowed to doubt, to question, to struggle. That you are allowed to run. That this One who I call God will surely find you. You might call it Love or Wonder or Beauty or Mystery. God goes by many names, many of which I do not know yet. I'm sure you will discover your own names for the One. I don't mind if your names are different than the ones I use. But what I want you to know is that Divinity is persistent. Again and again bubbling up in unexpected places, saving us in the Depths, saving the bits and pieces we didn't know needed saving. The Divine is always taking up new forms, like a poem that keeps being rewritten and becoming better and better.

I want you to know that when you find yourself feeling like you are drowning, when you feel swallowed up by what is huge and frightening (as we all do from time to time), that there will always be a light in the darkness. And sometimes the darkness is just the the thing we needed so we could discover the light. And oddly, sometimes the darkness is richer than the light and has more to teach us.

There are rarely easy answers. Sometimes we are swallowed or saved or called for no reason at all, or no reason we can understand. Sometimes we don't understand the whys or hows until much much later, and sometimes never at all. Sometimes we need to get angry, to shout, to rebel, like the one in the story. But he is called a Prophet anyway. He was a part of bringing hope to the undeserving, even though he was quite undeserving himself. And his story keeps living on, making meaning for others as we tell it and retell it. I want you to live your own story. To know that your story is meaningful and has the power to transform others. So go aheaad and be stubborn like the reluctant prophet. Be passionate and angry and loving and loved and thoroughly alive. Be swallowed up and reborn again and again in a thousand different ways. There will be a lot of giant fish: places that scare you, challenge you, rescue you, change you. Emerge from the belly of the fish to claim anew the Land that we call life again and again and again.

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