I met Jim at a tattoo parlor. There is a picture in your mind of who would frequent a tattoo parlor on a Thursday night. That picture is Jim. He has a bushy black beard. He's loud but not angry. He doesn't mind involving the whole group in his conversation. He'll ask a stranger in the chair next to him to agree on a point he's trying to make. He's spending another night getting his entire right arm tattooed. It's a dragon. Did you really have to ask what it was? Of course it's a dragon.  

You know who Jim is. Except that you have no clue who this guy is. Because over the next 5 hours while you and your friend (blog co-author Al Cedeno) are getting your tattoos you learn a lot about Jim. How many tattoos do you figure he has? Would you guess this is his first? Yeah, talk about taking the plunge. Jim made it fifty odd years of his life without even thinking about getting a tattoo. Now he has one that would cause you to believe he was born into the Hell's Angels. The beard is new too. So are the two DUI's he has. So is the house arrest he's under, the probation, the lawyers. It is all new. Jim isn't who you think he is.  

He's not drinking Gatorade. That's gin. You realize this when he refills the empty bottle from another flask-sized bottle of Gin he's been keeping in his hip pocket.

"You ever had a DUI?" Jim asks the guy doing my tattoo.  

"Sh*t, I've had three," my guy says. "Anyone with only two DUI's is a square."

"You want a drink?" Jim asks, offering the bottle. 

"I'm driving back to Detroit tonight," my guy says. "Plus, I gave it up. At some point you have to dry out."

As the hours pass Jim gets louder and more excited until he exclaims, "We need to do some coke!"

He threatens to fight new patrons, but only the ones who are bigger than he is.

At the end of the night he can't sign his name on his credit card receipt. He forgets his jacket. He doesn't know where his keys are. He's either peed himself or spilled his gin. It doesn't matter. He won't let us call him a cab. He only lives a mile away. He'll be fine. He falls over on the floor. I take his keys away. I tell him I'm driving him home. He spends the car ride apologizing for putting me out. He needs to be at work in 5 hours. I don't know how he'll do it.  

Jim found out after 25 years of marriage that his wife had driven them both into very, very deep debt. She had taken out home equity lines and maxed them out. Same with the credit cards. Jim was now celebrating his freedom. "My old lady," he told us "never wanted me to have a tattoo or a beard. She hated them."

He was more excited than I was when I got my first tattoo. But when I got my first tattoo my wife and daughter went with me. I was getting a tattoo of a stained-glass window. The window shows a scale seeking balance. The window appears to be nearly shattering. The design was one of several windows representing lines from the Lord's Prayer. This window was "lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil."

Jim and I will both remember the reasons for our first tattoos. They aren't just "cool." They mark a turning point in our lives. Mine is there to remind me of the evils I am prone to seek out. It marks my addictions. Addictions that had impacted my wife and our young family negatively. Because of God's grace my wife found forgiveness. The tattoo is a reminder of the healing that God provided in our lives and our request to him that he won't let us go down that path again. 

In the Old Testament when God did something important for his people they would build an altar of stones to remind them where they were in their journey when God met them. Physical geography has lost the importance it once had. My tattoo is a modern-day altar that reminds me of the place where God met me. 

My most recent tattoo is a picture of Jonah's head sticking out of the water. Directly behind him is an enormous tail belonging to the whale that will soon swallow him. Jonah is the only person in the Bible, that I know of, who tells God that he is so angry that he wants to die AFTER God saves him and brings salvation to the city of Nineveh. Normally the story ends with people thanking God for the goodness that He has done. Not Jonah. At the end he is still mad.  

Jonah is a story of God's patience with us. It is an example of the room for anger and resentment towards God. That's part of the story. It happens within obedience. Jonah eventually does what God told him to do. But he isn't happy and he doesn't need to be. Not right away.

I spent more than a couple of years being so angry I could die. The thought crossed my mind a few times and I came pretty close to visiting a hospital because of it. My family traveled through health issues, financial collapse, a pregnancy, raising young children, and lots and lots of anxiety during those years.  God and I spent a lot of time in mutual radio silence. 

One day at a church retreat there was scheduled time for personal prayer. I sat on the steps of the church and spaced out for a while. And I experienced a change of perspective. I noticed things about my life I hadn't been paying attention to. I saw that the belly of the whale I had been in wasn't a cosmic "time-out chair." It was a hospital room.

My sisters are nurses. They'll tell me about patients who are super angry about receiving the treatments that heal them. I feel that. Sometimes you can't recognize what is saving you and what is killing you. The Jonah on my arm reminds me that God waits for us to "dry out" like my tattoo artist said. 

Lane Severson is a recovering child-prodigy, father, and Anglican. Follow Lane on Twitter @ljseverson