You know that feeling you get when you know someone is angry with you? It feels a little like guilt or shame, but there’s also a sense of separation between you. No matter what you call it, the feeling isn’t good. Especially when you did something to deserve whatever anger is directed your way.

Ever wonder if God is angry with you? With people, the signs are usually clear—they scowl at you, yell at you, ignore you, or do some other bad thing to you. But if God was angry with you, how would you know?

We might think that when bad things happen to us, that’s a sign that God is angry with us.

But that wasn’t the case for Jonah. This runaway prophet had denied God’s call to share a message to the people in Nineveh. He got in a boat and went the opposite direction, so here’s what God did:

“Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up” (Jonah 1:4).

The storm was not designed to get back at Jonah. It was designed to bring Jonah back, both to God and his calling.

Bad things in your life are not signs that God is angry with you. Jesus received all the anger toward our sin when he was on a cross. God can use storms and other things that seem bad to accomplish something eternally good.