"Don't Waste the Contraction" on Jonah 2 by Michelle Ellis – March 2, 2025

In Jonah chapter 2, we’ve jumped in a ways into this story, but just in case you need a refresher, God called Jonah to be his prophet to people in a city called Nineveh, and in response, Jonah literally runs in the opposite direction. He jumps on a boat going somewhere totally different. While on this boat, there’s a big storm which Jonah tells everyone is his fault and to throw him overboard. Reluctantly they do. Then he is swallowed whole by a huge fish.

From the belly of the whale, Jonah has no choice but to face where he is. He’s in the depths of the ocean. He’s at a dead end. Pretty much everything is out of his control. And yet, this dark, stinky, uncomfortable and confining belly of the whale is like a womb for Jonah. Something new is being born in him there. This prayer of trust that we just read is born in him there.

Jonah probably didn’t picture the belly of the whale like a womb. It’s more likely he pictured it as a tomb. We don’t get to hear on which day in the whale that Jonah prayed this prayer. My guess is that it wasn’t within the first hour. My guess is that Jonah had a lot of other conversations with himself, and with God, too, before the Holy Spirit was able to birth this prayer in Jonah’s heart.

That’s the thing about birth. It takes a long time. It’s really messy and there is a lot of pain involved. When God is birthing something in us, it’s often really uncomfortable, just like giving birth to a baby is really uncomfortable. It feels awkward and heavy and even scary. It hurts, it really hurts. It can hurt so much that it can feel like things are moving in the dying direction instead of the life emerging direction. Birthing is a long, messy, painful process and when God is birthing something new in us, we don’t always have the perspective to know that we are even in labour. It can just feel really dark, confusing and uncomfortable. We don’t always have the perspective to know when we are in a womb as opposed to a tomb, and the two can feel quite similar. Both are dark, confining spaces in which it is very difficult to see.

You may know that over Christmas my mental health took a significant dive. This has been a “belly of the whale” time for me that has felt dark, confusing and uncomfortable. One piece stands out significantly for me in the past few months, however. At one point I heard God saying to me, “Michelle, don’t waste the contractions, use them, use them to push towards the new life I have for you.”

To give some context for those words, I have to share with you that when I was in labour with one of our kiddos, the doctor said to me, “Don’t waste the contraction! Use it!” Those words really irritated me at the time, but I’ve thought about them a lot since. Some of you will know that when you are in labour, an intense contraction will come over your body, and that is the time that you are supposed to push. That is the time that you are supposed to work with your body in the midst of the pain and push towards the new life. If you don’t push, the contraction is ‘wasted’, it doesn’t do the work it’s intended for. So when I heard God say to me, “Don’t waste the contractions, use them to push towards new life,” God was helping me to see that my pain was a sign that God was birthing something new in me. It wasn’t just that so many things in me were falling apart, though it felt like it, and sometimes still feels like that. God was saying, new life is coming. I still don’t know what shape this new life will take, but God has invited me to trust that it’s coming.

This church has been on my heart in this time as well, coming into a new season where there are many unknowns. Though I am not concerned about this church community in the sense that I can see how God has given this church just what it needs to be His church together going forward after Joe and I leave, I can also recognize that this upcoming season could feel like an uncomfortable time. But I wonder if this is a time that God might be calling this particular community of believers, too, to ‘use the contraction and not waste it’, to be in this uncomfortable time in a way that pushes towards the new life that is on its way, that God is birthing, that God desires to nourish and bring into being. I wonder if there are ways that God might be inviting this church to come into greater clarity about who it is, who God is calling it to be, and who God is among us. I wonder if this is a time where God might be birthing a new vision of how to be his followers, how to be salt and light as a church in this time with new ways of being. I wonder if this time that might in some ways feel like a tomb for TCC, might actually be a womb as well, just like the belly of the whale was for Jonah, a place of unknowns and limitations that God is using to birth new ways of being his people, new trust, new perspective, new faith, new life.

It’s fitting in so many ways that baptism is the sign that God gave the church to mark out each person’s beginning of theirr journey of faith. Because baptism is a picture of drowning and then coming up alive again, just like Jonah. This is something God will invite us to do again and again—dying to ourselves, dying to our need to control, dying to relying on our own power. And then He’ll do the miracle of raising us back to life, to His life. Only God can take tomb places and transform them into wombs. Only God can lead us through, not around, over or under death, but through it into his new life.

I’d like to close by noticing together the last piece of Jonah’s prayer. Jonah closes by saying in Jonah 2:9, “Salvation comes from the Lord alone.” It’s a statement of trust. Because Jonah hasn’t yet seen that salvation. He’s still in the belly of the whale. Jonah’s whole prayer is in fact a statement of trust because he’s praying it not after he’s saved, but before. When you’re in labour, you really need people to come alongside you and say, ‘There’s a baby coming! It’s so close! New life is almost here! Keep going!’ This sounds nuts, but when I was pregnant I remember actually thinking, “I’m going to be the only person who was pregnant forever. This new life will never come.” It is easy to despair in the midst of the discomfort and pain of labour. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to show us together how to spur one another on in our trust that God is at work and that His new life is coming, in each one of us and in our shared life as disciples of Jesus. Let’s watch and wait for him together, through the labour pains, through the discomfort, through the darkness, so that we can say together with Jonah, “From the depths of the grave I called for help and you listened to my cry.” Amen.