Nahum was a prophet tasked with warning of coming judgment on the city of Ninevah in the ancient empire Assyria. If that sounds to you exactly like the call of Jonah, you’re right, it IS exactly like the call of Jonah. The only difference is the when – Jonah wrote his book in 785-760 BC and Nahum wrote his in 663-612 BC, roughly 100 years later than Jonah. When Jonah went, the people of Ninevah listened, mourned, repented, and changed their lives…for a little while. Obviously, that’s a little (a lot) convicting when I start to think of how many times I make a nice change until I don’t.

Anyway. Verse 6 in chapter 1 reads, “Who can withstand his indignation? Who can endure his fierce anger? His wrath is poured out like fire; the rocks are shattered before him.” That isn’t a very feel-good passage, right? But verse 7 sounds different, “The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him.”

The note in my Bible says, “For those who refuse to believe, God’s punishment is like an angry fire. But to those who love Him, His mercy is a refuge.”

An awful lot of the Scriptures, maybe all of it (from a perspective), details the choice we all have: whether we will or will not enter into a relationship with this God. Will we believe, follow, fall in love, and if we do, what does that actually mean? These verses seem to say, this relationship is up to us. The kind of relationship we have with God depends on our engagement. I think that’s true, God extends His loving hands to all of us, the question is if we will hold it or not. God gives us all the coat, we decide if we’ll put it on. There’s a place already reserved for us at the table, will we sit down with Him? What kind of relationship do we want, what kind will we choose?

It’s a big question, maybe the biggest.

But what I’m thinking about now is, in our daily lives, how much is left to our engagement, or lack thereof. Is the level of meaning we find in our lives closely linked to our level of participation? Does the depth of our relationships correlate to the depth of our immersion in those relationships?

Some very good friends of mine once criticized a church I belonged to as “clique-y” and “closed to anyone new.” Maybe it was. But would it have been so closed if they had shown up more often? Do we consider groups to be cliques if we are on the inside, and if showing up is the only requisite to our entrance?

(I recognize there are actual closed groups where the walls are made of steel, immovable, impenetrable, and awfully nasty. But are these the much more rare exemptions, as in ascribing psychopathic behavior to the general population? OR, now that I’m farther into this, is this simply another example of the importance of perspective, the idea that we get what we’re looking for? I find notably less locked doors now that I operate as if all doors are wide open. Is that true?)

What I know to be true is that showing up to our lives, awake and accepting of possibility, while not leading to a perfect life (and what is that anyway????), certainly leads to beauty, significance, and weight. We won’t ever experience the exhilaration of the ocean if we only dip our toes and run from the tide. Maybe the only question left is, (in our relationship with God, our spouses, friends, neighbors, strangers, enemies, our world, ourselves), how deep are we willing to go?