Being a Prophet is Thankless Work

I'm starting to feel like I'm back in graduate school. There's always "homework" hanging over my head these days. Every day, I have to plan my day around when I can get my 12 pages of reading done. If I know I have plans after work, I try to read over lunch. If I know I have lunch plans, I get up early and read before work. That blows, by the way. I am so not a morning person - but I digress. The really fun days are those in which something happens I hadn't prepared for in advance and I have to scramble to find a suitable reading time replacement. And I only have my own schedule to arrange. I can't imagine how people with small children are doing this, but I give them props.

Though I complain from time to time about getting all this reading done in a short span of time, I can at least thank my lucky stars that I am not a prophet. Those poor dudes had it rough. I didn't even know there was a section of the Bible devoted to prophets but I've spent the last 180 or so pages reading about them (and still have more to go) and have learned a couple things about being a prophet:

1) They have a lot of scary-ass visions. It'd be enough to make me not want to sleep again for the rest of my natural life.
2) The messages they communicated with the people fell on deaf ears.
Every.
Time.
It's amazing they had the tenacity to keep trying to reach these "stiff necked" people. You gotta give 'em credit for trying.
3) When someone really doesn't want to hear their message, they should be afraid. Very afraid. Prophesying the truth landed them in jail and sometimes worse. Turns out, if you're the king and you don't like what the prophet says, you just kill the messenger. Literally.

In a recent sermon, Pastor Becca said that the prophets are sometimes described as the manic, the depressive and the chaotic. I'd not really realized it at the time (my mind tended to wander a bit during the prophets) but that's a pretty good description. Isaiah was very, um, high energy. Jeremiah was very "woe is me, woe is you, woe are we." And I think Ezekiel was in need of some lithium. The one thing they all had in common, though, was their purpose. God chose them to try to reach God's people - to tell them to stop screwing up or they were going to be screwed. Well, I think we all know what happened.

And then there's Daniel. I like Daniel. He too has scary-ass visions but he seems different from the previous 3 guys. I don't know why. Daniel seems like a good guy. His faith never wavered and so far he hasn't killed the husband of a woman he slept with so already I like him much better than David. In any event, I can tell that we're definitely building up to something by this point in the Bible. I'm ready for it.

I'm ready to start reading about the God I know.