Jonah's psalm from Jonah 2 ... we treat it as a prayer - a tidy theology lesson about distress and repentance and rescue. And it is all of those things. But here's what I don't want us to miss: Jonah didn't write this prayer at a desk with a cup of coffee. He prayed it in the dark, soaked to the bone, inside a living thing. Have you ever stopped to think what that experience was like for Jonah? It's detailed throughout his prayer!
Most of us read Jonah 2 from a safe, dry distance.
We treat it as a prayer - a tidy theology lesson about distress and repentance and rescue. And it is all of those things. But here's what I don't want us to miss: Jonah didn't write this prayer at a desk with a cup of coffee. He prayed it in the dark, soaked to the bone, inside a living thing.
So this week in the journal, we're trying something a little different. We're going to stop reading about Jonah's experience and start standing where Jonah stood. We're going to use our five senses.
It's exactly what it sounds like. You take a passage and you slow WAY down, asking: If I were here, what would I see? Hear? Feel? Taste? Smell?
It isn't about making things up. It's about paying closer attention to what's already on the page - and letting the details move from your head down into your body. Because that's where Jonah was writing from. The man gives us a remarkable amount of sensory detail in this short chapter, and once you start looking for it, you can't un-see it.
Let's climb in.
Darkness. That's the honest answer. No sun, no horizon, no holy temple in view ... though he says he longed to look toward it again (2:4). Whatever faint, murky light there was would have filtered through water and flesh. Picture the green-black of the deep, weeds drifting past, and a man straining his eyes for anything familiar.
Remember in chapter 1, God hurled a wind at the sea? In chapter 2, Jonah says God hurled him - into the very heart of the seas (2:3). And it is LOUD down there. The roar of currents. Waves and breakers crashing overhead. The groan and gurgle of the creature around him. And then, underneath it all, the smallest sound of all: his own voice, praying.
This is the one that gets me. The cold. The crushing weight of the deep pressing in from every side. The currents sweeping over him again and again. Seaweed - actual seaweed - wrapped around his head (2:5). He says he sank to the roots of the mountains, that the earth's bars closed behind him "forever" (2:6). He felt trapped. He felt his life slipping away (2:7). Read those verses slowly and let yourself feel how heavy they are.
Saltwater, surely. But be honest about where he was ... there would have been bitterness, brine, the taste of the sea and of the creature itself. Nothing about this was clean or comfortable. (Take a look at the example pages in the back of the journal, look at what my friend Steph noted for what Jonah might have tasted! Sushi will never be the same!)
I'll just say it: you do NOT want to fully imagine the smell. The brine, the seaweed, the raw stench of the inside of a great fish. This is not a sanitized Sunday-school picture. It's awful. And that's the point.
Here's why I love reading this way: you cannot feel the rescue until you've felt the depths.
When Jonah cries out "Salvation belongs to the LORD!" (2:9) at the end of his prayer, it lands so differently once you've sat in the dark, cold, stinking weight of where he's praying from. He isn't praising God after he's been spit out onto dry land. He's praising God while he's still in the belly. Still in the dark. That's faith with the lights off.
And isn't that exactly where most of us have prayed our most honest prayers? Not from the mountaintop ... from the deep.
In this week's journal pages, there's a two-page spread where we walk through all five senses together - noting what Jonah recorded, and adding our own words to describe what that experience might have been like. It's a slow, rich way to sit in the text, and it's one of my favorite spreads in the whole study.
This is where I went deeper this week ... and you can too. Grab your Bible, read Jonah 2 out loud, and ask yourself those five questions. You'll never read it the same way again.
