God’s desire for Nineveh was not that people settle up some debt for their sins. It was only that they turn from their destructive ways of being in the world and come more fully alive.
Maybe Christ is inviting you and me to let our uncertainty not be a shield but to have enough humility and hope to come and see that the world is filled with the glory of God.
Don’t you think that turning our loneliness into the abundant life we were created for might be why Jesus risked stepping into that line of complicated humans at the Jordan River to strike up a friendship that has now extended even to us?
I wonder if grace could be better described as the warm waters of birth that nurture us in the womb, that bathe us in unconditional love, and then launch us into new light and life, no matter what our age.
You and I and every child who’s ever been filled with anticipation for what delight might await them in the morning have known a form of unconditional love. Jesus would just expand radically what and whom in this world we might come to love in just that unabashed way, as we come to trust that God loved each one of us in just that unabashed way first.