Praying the Prayer of Jonah

Last updated on: February 5, 2016 at 8:35 am by Anne Kennedy

Praying the Prayer of Jonah 2016-02-05T08:35:03-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I have a little mathematical quandrum (you take quandary and you mush it together with conundrum and you end up with The Best Word Ever). What do you do when the number of hours in the day remains constant but the amount of work you think you ought to be doing goes sharply up?

This happens to me every so often in life. I’m going along with a reasonable work load and then something happens so that I have more work to do, and then I juggle everything around so as to get rid of as much of the work as I can, so that I can return to my original state of comfort.

That’s one option. Just drop a lot of the work. Option two is what I tried this week, Don’t Take a Day Off. Just work all the days. It’ll be fine, I told myself. I am weak and lazy. I should do more anyway, this will be great for my overall character.

And it was great until midway through yesterday when I sat down “for a second” and then just didn’t get back up again.

Option three, as far as I can see it, is to complain, both in person and on the Internet.

And I’m stumped for a forth option.

This is where the bible has shown up for me as a troubling interpreter of my exasperating life experience. I say to myself, ‘I must do all the things. I must not be weak and helpless because that will be very bad and either reality will collapse or everybody will hate me.” And then I go around and read the bible and discover that every moment of self dependence, of doing all the things because I’m supposed to do them by the power of my own awesomeness, is actually not God’s “plan” for my life.

Why am I doing all the things? What am I expecting to gain by muscling myself through each day by the power of my own will? The experience of profound and total helplessness, which I resist with the entirety of my being, is central to the Christian Gospel. The point of Jesus is that I can’t. I don’t. I haven’t. I am unable. I’m lying in bed with no energy and no will and I want to stay there and not cope. And that, in so far as I can’t, he, Jesus, can. Not “yes we can”, to quote some far off vacuous slogan, but rather, Only He Can.

A long while ago I started writing about The Prayer of Jonah, in contra distinction to the Prayer of Jabez, which is not a universal prayer to be prayed by all people, nor even the Prayer of Jesus, which should be prayed by all of us. But what happens when you can’t pray? With words? Slogging your way through the Lord’s Prayer when you don’t see your way to putting that first foot on the floor is exactly the point. You should pray, you should get up, but you can’t. You don’t have it.

So, the Prayer of Jonah, then, is all I’m left with. Jonah prayed his prayer when he was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. He prayed it in the grips of death. He prayed it when he had no hope, no strength, no will, no nothing. And what was his prayer? A Cry. It was a desperate cry for help. Help me, O God, Save me.

And God, hearing Jonah’s cry, of course said, No Help For You Sinner. Because you should have had it together. All the stuff I told you to do I meant for you to do. So what’s wrong with you, stop sinning and being weak!

That’s what I think God is going to say to me no matter what I pray. But he never says that. Whenever I cry out for help, he always helps me. Always. Without fail.

I keep wanting to move past the prayer of Jonah onto some other bigger, more interesting prayer. I want to make progress, or something. But that is a futile wish. Why would I want to move past something so essential? Why would I push my weakness aside when God is so complete in his practical salvation?

The result of praying the prayer of Jonah is that Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, moves your body and mind for you. You are there, certainly, but you were so weak there’s no way you can take credit for the work that you ended up doing. That anything was done by your hands and mind has to reflect to the Glory of God, because you were so desperately helpless.

And on that note, I will go do all of the things, through Christ who strengthens me, much to my chagrin.

The Prayer of Jonah

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