Jonah

I finished reading "Jonah". It was a fictional account of Jonah's life and the lives of the two kings he prophesied to; Asshur-Dan of Ninevah, and Jeroboam of Israel. While it is fictional, it does give a lot of historical background and other "filler" information that is not contained in the few shorts chapters in the Bible. It also gives a more human look at the characters themselves, and more understanding of the timeline. Where the Bible says that Jonah got on a boat to Tarshish and there was a storm and he told the ship's master to throw him off and the storm would stop; this book gives more perspective to show that maybe Jonah was on that boat a lot more than one day (like maybe halfway to Tarshish- which was an 8-week journey) and how he struggled and coped with the fact that he was disobeying GOD, and how he struggled with the fact that he felt like he was betraying his upbringing by feeling compassion for the Ninevites, and how he fought within himself not wanting to feel compassion for them.
It made me think quite a bit. Especially about how our upbringings (at home and in the church) can cloud the way we see the world around us, and how sometimes that interferes with God's plans, and how very wrong we can be for holding to that ideal- life and death wrong!