Jonah-esque

I've been listening to Taylor Leonhart's lovely new album, Hold Still, on repeat.  (You should definitely avail yourself of the pleasure!)

Belly of a Whale particularly captured my heart.  

...but You cannot resist Your tendency to save me from myself...

...but You cannot resist Your habit of forgetting how I fail...

These lines struck me as a gentler, less cynically ironic rendition of some of my favorite words that the prophet Jonah spoke: "I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to become angry, rich in faithful love, and One who relents from sending disaster."  

They also reminded me of the words that we pray each week in my church: "You are the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy."

What a remarkable truth.  There are times when, like Jonah, I find myself wishing that God wasn't quite so merciful, because it is not my nature to always have mercy.  It's my character to run out of patience and graciousness, to want people to get what they have coming sometimes, to assume that they'll take grace for granted.

And they do.  I certainly do.

So in the depths of my being, I cannot thank God enough that it is His tendency, His habit, His character, to always show mercy to His beloved children.

[In a very tangentially related story -- really one that's about Kicky and I'm just including here because it entertains me -- a few nights ago we were bugging her and poking her (since she likes to squirm very discontentedly until she knows that Jason has also paid a requisite amount of attention to her before letting us go to sleep...) and apparently exceeded how much she wanted to play.  She shifted sides of my stomach, away from the right where she usually camps out, the whole way over to the left.  Fleeing to the opposite side of the universe, we laughed, thinking of how much it was like Jonah's attempts to flee, Adam and Eve's attempts to hide.]