Reaching Out To My Nineveh

Thought for the day: "The will of God will not take you anywhere that the grace of God cannot protect you"

Amen.

Today in church (shout out to Mother Anjel and St. Luke's in Baltimore!!), the homily had to do with Jonah and Nineveh...how Jonah was being sent into this unfamiliar place, this hotbed of dissent and destruction, and far from being the kind of eager saint who jumps up and says "SURE!!"...he did not want to go...

I mean, he did not want to go AT ALL. And Mother Anjel went on to say that each of us as Christians has a Nineveh. We all have a place that we are being called to do God's work, a place that for one reason or another is giving us reason to be like "oh HELL no...I can't do it"

But how many of ya'll know that not only CAN we do it, we WILL do it if God has anything to do with it?

I started thinking about my own Nineveh...and its not somewhere that I don't want to go necessarily...its just somewhere that has taught me to augment my thinking...I am an assistant teacher at The Jewish Community Center in Baltimore, and while I love all 12 of my children to pieces, working with my head teacher who has a completely different belief system when it comes to disciplining children, causes me to chafe sometimes.

I enjoy teaching. I enjoy learning, but Lord knows there are days where I have literally been praying for inner strength up until the point where I walked in the door. I have had to learn to be humble, moreso than I have ever had to be before. I have had to learn to be gracious, and slow to anger, and patient. I think the biggest thing that I have learned inthis is that I am called to be a teacher...I am being trained and all the anger and resentment in the world at the stripes I have to endure on the way to having my own classroom can change the fact that God designed me to work with his smallest angels.

So I understand Nineveh...I understand reaching out to something when every fiber of common sense wants to say screw you and move on, and I definitely understand being covered by Jehovah Shalom as He prepares me to do bigger and better things.

Amen.