There's a prayer in the Bible that are some tough words to read. 

It shows up twice, from two different prophets, and it's almost word for word the same both times. Lord, I'm done. Please just take my life.

Jonah prays it in Jonah 4. Elijah prays it in 1 Kings 19. And when you set those two chapters side by side, something really interesting happens. From the outside, the two scenes look like the same photograph. A prophet, all alone, out in the middle of nowhere, sitting under a plant, asking God to let him die.

But what was going on inside those two men could not have been more different.

That's what we're working through in this week's pages of the Jonah journal.

Elijah is out past Beersheba in the wilderness, sitting under a broom tree. He has run about as far as a person can run.

Jonah is east of Nineveh, sitting under a little shelter he built himself, watching the city.

Both men are alone on purpose. Elijah left his servant behind in Beersheba before he went any farther. Jonah walked out of a city full of people who had just turned to God. Both of them wanted distance.

And both of them had just come off the biggest moment of their entire ministries.

For Elijah, it was Mount Carmel. Fire fell from heaven. The prophets of Baal were exposed in front of everyone. Rain finally came after three and a half years of drought. If anything was ever going to turn the nation back to God, it was that day.

Then Jezebel sent him one message. By this time tomorrow you'll be dead.

And Elijah ran. He won, and nothing changed, and it broke something in him.

For Jonah, it was Nineveh. The whole city repented, from the king on down. It's the largest revival recorded anywhere in Scripture, and it came from the least enthusiastic sermon ever preached.

And Jonah 4 opens by telling us this made Jonah furious.

Then he says the most honest thing in the entire book. This is exactly why I ran the first time. I knew you were gracious and merciful, slow to anger, full of love, and that you relent from sending disaster. (We talked about this the last few weeks on the blog, remember?)

He's quoting Exodus 34 there, God's own words about Himself. Jonah's theology was never the problem. He understood God perfectly. He just wanted Him to be someone else.

This is where the two prophets separate.

Elijah was afraid, exhausted, and lonely. Look at what he tells God in 1 Kings 19:10. I've given everything. They've torn down the altars. They've killed the prophets. I'm the only one left, and now they want me too.

That's not rebellion. That's grief. That's a man who believes his life's work failed and that he's the last one standing.

Jonah wasn't just exhausted. Jonah was angry.

He doesn't collapse anywhere. He builds himself a shelter, sits down, and waits to see what happens to the city. He's still hoping it burns.

Elijah ran away from something. Jonah sat down to watch.

Here's the short version we discover in our study.

Elijah believed the right things about God and forgot the right things about himself. His theology held up just fine. His view of himself did not. He kept saying I'm the only one left, and it simply wasn't true. Before that conversation is over, God tells him plainly that seven thousand people in Israel have never bowed to Baal. Elijah's numbers were wrong, and his exhaustion was doing the counting.

His body was empty too. He hadn't eaten. He hadn't slept. He had run for his life across an entire country. His despair had a body attached to it, and that matters.

Jonah knew the right things about God and wouldn't let any of it reach his heart. There's nothing wrong with Jonah's information. Everything is wrong with what he does with it. He holds God's mercy the way you'd hold evidence in a case against somebody. He isn't confused at all. He's offended.

And then there's this. The only time in the whole book that Jonah is described as happy is when God gives him a plant for shade. Not when the storm stops. Not when the fish lets him go. Not when a hundred and twenty thousand people are spared. A plant.

He didn't lecture either one of them.

To Elijah, God sent sleep and a meal. Twice. An angel woke him, told him to eat, let him sleep again, then fed him a second time and told him the journey was too much for him. Only after all of that did God bring him to Horeb and ask him what he was doing there. And when God finally spoke, it wasn't in the wind or the earthquake or the fire. It was a whisper.

And then He gave him something to do, including a man named Elisha who would stand alongside him.

To Jonah, God sent a question, a plant, a worm, and a scorching wind. Is it right for you to be angry? He gave Jonah something small to love, took it away, and asked him again. You cared about a plant you didn't make and didn't grow, that came up overnight and died overnight. Should I not care about a hundred and twenty thousand people?

Two very different responses, but both of them were mercy.

God met each man where he actually was.

Elijah gets an answer. By the time we reach the end of 1 Kings 19:18, God has corrected what Elijah got wrong, told him he was never as alone as he thought, and handed him the next thing to do. The conversation closes.

Jonah's doesn't. The book ends in the middle of a conversation, with God's question just sitting there and no answer written down. We never find out what Jonah said.

That's not a missing page. The question was left open because it was never only for Jonah. This leads us to our Devotional Ripple on the next page.

God asks a lot of questions He already knows the answers to. Where are you? What are you doing here, Elijah? Who do you say that I am? He isn't asking because He needs the information. He's asking because the answering is for us.

And notice how gently He puts it to Jonah.

Not how dare you.

Not you have no right to feel that way.

Just, is this doing you any good?

Is this anger taking you somewhere you actually want to go?

Jonah's anger wasn't crazy. Nineveh really was brutal. Assyria really was a threat to real people that Jonah really loved. He had a case.

It's easy to lay down anger when we know it's petty. It's a lot harder to lay down anger we believe is deserved.

So the whisper comes. Maybe you've heard it. In the car, in the shower, at two in the morning, somewhere in the middle of rehearsing that same conversation for the fortieth time. Is it right for you to be angry?

Maybe it came when someone else got the thing you had prayed and waited years for. When the person who hurt you seemed to walk away without a scratch. When you did everything the right way and it still didn't work out. When someone you love got let off a hook you're still hanging on.

Those are real wounds and God isn't brushing past them. But He is asking whether we want to go build a shelter outside the city and sit down to watch.

Because that's what anger does when we keep feeding it. It finds a spot with a good view and it settles in.

If Elijah's story shows us that God is tender with us when we're exhausted, Jonah's shows us that God is patient with us when we're resentful.

He fed one and He questioned the other, and He didn't walk away from either one.