Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Oceans, and Boats, and Whales, Oh My!

Since he was quite young, Jonah has known about the story of Jonah and the Whale. Most often when he got a gift as a baby or toddler it was one of two things: something related to Noah's Ark, or a whale. The former was due to people's confusion regarding his name. It was one of the biblical characters having to do with water, that much they remembered. The specifics, obviously, were a bit more vague.

The older he got, the more people loved to tell him about Jonah and the Whale. Why they thought telling a boy named Jonah a story about a person named Jonah getting thrown off a boat and being eaten by a big fish was a good idea, I'm still not sure. But it was a scenario that played itself out many times. It actually got so bad that there were a couple times he would start crying when someone just tried to hand him a whale toy (of which we had [have?] several).

Now, I can't fault any individual for wanting to tell him the story. It's certainly not a problem telling a child a bible story, especially considering the story of Jonah is often one of the first bible stories a child learns. This was only an issue due to the fact that it happened so often! So, as we've had our various devotions and whatnot I've typically avoided that story. Not hard to do, when there are so many to cover! But recently, Jonah has started asking about it. When we've done our evening devotions (which isn't nearly as often as it should be, I confess) every once in a while when I'm looking for where we left off he'll ask if we can do Jonah instead. I had wanted to start in Genesis and just go straight through (skipping lineages and most of Numbers, of course, considering the age group), so I usually tell him that we'll read about that when we get there.

Tonight I decided that instead of reading more about Isaac, we would read from Psalms. So, I asked the boys, "Do you know what we're going to read tonight?", expecting to hear "Abraham" or "Maybe the flood?" or something else we'd discussed recently. I should have expected what I actually did hear, which was Jonah piping in with, "Um, well, maybe we should read about Jonah." Since I was jumping out of order anyway, I thought about it a bit. This pause apparently tipped the boys off that I was considering it, because Nathan then jumped in with, "Yeah, we'll read about Jonah! THEN, we'll read about Nathan!"

Now, we had of course told Nathan that he was named after a prophet. But no one ever made nearly as big a deal about it as they had with Jonah. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if most people didn't even remember that Nathan was a prophet, much less which and what he did (rich man, poor man, stolen sheep... It'll come back to you). The story of Jonah is easy to tell, and Jonah is the main character. Nathan on the other hand comes into play in someone else's story, and not at a time that I particularly want to discuss with my three and five year olds.

So this evening, we read the first part of Jonah. I tried to explain to Nathan that there were other things we needed to read before we could read about Nathan. I'm pretty sure he didn't understand, but he accepted it and we moved on. I'm pretty sure this isn't the last I'll hear of this though...