Rights and Wrongs of Love 1

Sometimes the shocking thing about being a parent is watching how your love comes through to your kids. Most days as a parent, I think Mindy and I are just making it by. Sure, we are intentional about teaching them God’s love, but some days we wonder how it will translate. Gavin is our most temperamental kid.  When we discipline him, he will usually give us some kind of shocking face. Often, it seems like he wants to punish us for punishing him. He will run to his room, or even tell me I am a bad daddy. We never know what we are going to get with that kid. However, Gavin is also my most loving kid. He is the one that will give his mom back rubs, and come in at night to give me a kiss. A lot of his personality is far from my understanding. He functions, reacts, and responds differently than I do. My greatest challenge is to learn about Gavin and understand the middle child. My wife and my brother were middle children, and I watch how Gavin is similar to them. As his father, I seek out ways to love him. Lately, I have had the huge blessing of spending more time with him.  When Jacob started Kindergarten and began leaving for school with Mindy, I missed Jacob’s leadership and guidance at home showing the other kids what to do. Soon I realized that this gave me more time with Gav.  Rather than doing his own thing and letting me do mine, getting everyone’s stuff together to go, he wants to check in and help.  He wants to carry around his lunch box rather than keeping it on the counter where I have things gathered.  He wants to sit and watch Sportscenter with me instead of playing.  These first few months of preschool have allowed me to see unique pieces of his heart, and I am learning how to love him instead of expecting him to be like Jacob, or me. 

This may sound harsh, but it’s our “unique” personalities that God loves when He loves 1, or loves us. He embraces us the way we are and loves us, so that we can love others.

           

What does this have to do with Jonah? Well, we finally get to that big fish. As we talk about the big fish, we are really talking about God’s love for His prophet. The more you get into Jonah’s story, the more you wonder why God kept using this guy. Couldn’t He have found someone better than Jonah to go speak to these people? Maybe God knew, since He is omniscient and all, that only Jonah was going to break through to Ninevah. Here is something else to think about. God had a lot of prophets, and they were all very different. They each had some quirk that made them “unique”, and yet God used all of them.

The biggest piece for us this weekend is embracing the idea that “The Rights and Wrongs of Love 1” have more to do with letting God love us and shape how He uses us. Being human, we don’t want anyone to see our flaws, even though we know that every single person has them. God, who comes to forgive us, re-shapes our flaws, which then translates into uniqueness to work for His glory. God took stubborn, crazy Jonah, who was selfish on most days and even wanted to die, and used him to redeem a city. Not only that, God used the reference of Jonah inside the fish to relate to Jesus’ redemption for you and me.