In the Belly of a Whale

Michael Packard, 56, is a licensed commercial lobster diver in Provincetown, Massachusetts, who was enjoying a typical Friday morning of diving to lift lobsters off the sandy ocean floor last week. His boat, the "Ja'n J," was surrounded by fishermen catching striped bass, and the water was a balmy 60 degrees when he dove in at a little before 8 a.m.

With full scuba gear in place, Packard remembers swimming past schools of sand lances and stripers as he looked to the bottom, scanning for lobsters. And then everything went black.

"All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove, and the next thing I knew, it was completely black," Packard reported after he was released from Cape Cod Hospital on Friday afternoon. "I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth."

While it is nearly nonexistent to hear of humpback whales injuring swimmers, Packard indeed was swallowed whole by a feeding humpback. The medium-sized whale was likely a juvenile feeding on the cape's sand lance. Humpbacks, which are not aggressive animals, typically billow out their mouth like a parachute to feed, creating a blindspot directly in front. Packard estimates that he was in the whale's mouth for less than a minute.

"I was completely inside. It was completely black," he said. "I thought to myself, 'There's no way I'm getting out of here. I'm done. I'm dead.' All I could think of was my boys. They're 12 and 15 years old."

Then Packard felt the whale begin to shake its head.

"I saw light, and he started throwing his head side to side. The next thing I knew, I was outside [in the water]," Packard said.

Packard's crewmate watched the whale burst to the surface, then spit Packard out into the ocean. Packard, who emerged with plenty of bruises but no broken bones, says he is thankful that he wasn't swallowed by a white shark, which are common in the cape and extremely dangerous.

"It's not something I have heard happening before," said Jooke Robbins, director of Humpback Whale Studies at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. And yet many of us are hearing parallels with the Old Testament book of Jonah, in which Jonah resists a calling from God and finds himself in the belly of a whale. While VeggieTales and other childhood renditions of the tale pass lightly over Jonah's resistance, taking us quickly to the miracle of his newfound faith in the Lord, his stubbornness is actually quite remarkable -- and indicative of the remarkable ways we all tend to set aside, ignore, or resist God's good plans for us.

The book of Jonah opens here:

But Jonah ran away from the Lord (Jonah 1:3).

And soon moves to here:

But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry (Jonah 4:1).

And finally closes with Jonah overheating under a withering plant, still unable to hear God's will for him:

Jonah wanted to die, and said, "It would be better for me to die than to live" (Jonah 4:8).

As we ponder the wonder of Packard's Jonah experience, how willing are you to listen for God's calling? Do you set parameters on the Lord's will, allowing for some changes but not others? Do you sometimes find yourself upset about the path your life has taken, or feverishly frustrated as you sit beneath a plan that you thought would one day grow into something bigger?

Take some time to reread the book of Jonah this week with fresh eyes, listening for your own walk with the Lord. How can we be reminders to one another of the hope, peace, and joy that God promises when we turn to Him with open arms?