Jonah was a man whose job was to listen for God, and to tell other people what God said. That was a hard job. Sometimes God told him things that other people did not want to hear. But Jonah usually did it anyway, because that was his job.

One day, God told Jonah something new. "Get up," God said. "Go to the great city of Nineveh, and tell the people there to stop being so wicked. They are doing terrible things to each other, and to everyone around them. Tell them to stop, before it is too late."

Now Jonah did not want to do this. The people of Nineveh were Jonah's enemies. They had hurt his country and his family for many years. He did not want to walk all the way to their city. He did not want to stand in their streets and tell them anything. And worst of all, he was afraid that if he told them to stop, they actually would, and then God would forgive them. Jonah did not want them forgiven. He wanted them punished.

So Jonah did something he had never done before. He ran the other way.

He went down to the sea, and he found a ship that was sailing as far away from Nineveh as a ship could go. He paid the captain. He went down inside the ship. He lay down. And he tried very hard to forget what God had asked him to do.

But God had not forgotten.

While Jonah was sleeping below decks, a great storm came up on the sea. It was not an ordinary storm. The wind was so strong that the ship cracked. The waves were so high that the sailors thought they were going to die.

The sailors were terrified. Each one prayed to his own god, and they threw all their cargo into the water to make the ship lighter. Nothing helped. The storm got worse.

The captain went down inside the ship and found Jonah, fast asleep. "How can you sleep?" the captain shouted. "Get up! Pray to your God! Maybe he will save us!"

The sailors had begun to suspect that the storm was not an accident. They drew lots, that was how people in those days asked who was to blame for something, and the lot fell on Jonah. They turned to him. "Who are you?" they asked. "What have you done?"

Jonah told them everything. He told them about God. He told them about Nineveh. He told them he was running away. The sailors were even more frightened now. "What should we do to make the storm stop?" they asked.

Jonah looked at the waves. He knew. "Throw me into the sea," he said. "It is my fault. The storm will stop when I am gone."

The sailors did not want to do this. They tried to row back to land instead. But the storm was too strong. At last, with terrible sadness, they lifted Jonah up and threw him over the side.

The sea went calm at once.

Jonah sank down into the dark water. He thought he was going to drown. But before he reached the bottom, something enormous opened its mouth and swallowed him whole.

It was a great fish that God had sent. And inside the belly of the fish, in the dark, Jonah did what he should have done long before. He prayed. He told God he was sorry. He said that if God saved him, he would do what God had asked.

Three days and three nights he was in the dark. Then the fish swam to a beach, and opened its mouth, and Jonah stumbled out onto the sand, alive.

God spoke to Jonah a second time. "Get up," God said. "Go to the great city of Nineveh, and tell the people what I told you to tell them."

This time, Jonah went.

Nineveh was so big that it took three days to walk across it. Jonah went one day's walk into the city, and then he stopped, and he called out as loud as he could:

"In forty days, Nineveh will be destroyed."

That was all he said. He did not explain. He did not soften it. He just said it, and walked on, and said it again in another street, and another street.

Now the surprising thing happened. The people of Nineveh listened.

They listened to a tired, salty, foreign-looking man walking through their city saying they had forty days. And they believed him. They were sorry for what they had been doing. The news ran from house to house, faster than Jonah could walk. By the end of the day, every person in the city had heard.

Even the king of Nineveh heard. He got down off his throne, and he took off his fancy robe, and he put on rough cloth, the way people did in those days when they were sorry. He sat in the ashes from his own fireplace. He sent out a message: every person in the city, and every animal, was to stop eating, and stop drinking, and pray for God's mercy. Maybe, the king said, God will see how sorry we are, and not destroy us.

And God did see. God saw that they were truly sorry. And God did not destroy the city.

You might think Jonah would be glad. He had done his job. The city had listened. Many thousands of people who would have died were going to live.

But Jonah was not glad. He was angry. He had been right, and he hated being right. He went outside the city and sat down on a hill and shouted at God.

"This is exactly why I ran away the first time!" Jonah said. "I knew you would do this! I knew you were a kind God, slow to anger, full of love, ready to forgive anyone who was sorry. I did not want them forgiven. I wanted them punished. And now you have forgiven them, and I am so angry that I would rather die than live."

Jonah sat down on the hill and watched the city, hoping that maybe God would still destroy it.

The sun was very hot. So God made a small plant grow up beside Jonah, with big green leaves, and the leaves gave Jonah shade. Jonah was very pleased about the plant. It was the first thing that had made him happy in days.

But the next morning, God sent a worm. The worm chewed through the stem of the plant, and the plant withered, and the leaves dried up, and the shade was gone. The sun beat down on Jonah's head, and a hot wind blew, and Jonah said again that he wanted to die.

Then God spoke to him.

"You are upset about the plant," God said. "You did not plant it. You did not water it. You did not make it grow. It came up in a night, and it died in a night, and you are angry that it is gone. Should I not feel even more, then, about the great city of Nineveh, where there are more than a hundred thousand people who do not even know their right hand from their left, and also many cattle?"

The book of Jonah ends there. It does not say what Jonah said back. It does not say if Jonah understood, or if he kept being angry, or if he ever went home.

Sometimes a story ends with a question, and the question is for the person reading it.