The Prayer He Swore He'd Forgotten

In 1988, a commercial diver named David Wardell was working sixty feet beneath the surface of the North Sea when his air hose snagged on a jagged piece of wreckage. The line crimped. His breathing mix thinned to almost nothing. In the pitch darkness of that freezing water, Wardell did something that surprised even himself — he prayed. Not eloquently. Not theologically. He gasped out the same words his grandmother had taught him at her kitchen table in Aberdeen when he was five years old: "God, I am small. You are big. Please help me."

Wardell had not set foot inside a church in twenty-three years. He had told his wife he didn't believe in any of it anymore. Yet in that suffocating dark, the prayer came back like muscle memory, rising from somewhere deeper than his doubts.

His dive partner reached him ninety seconds later and freed the line.

Jonah had spent days running from the Almighty — buying a ticket to Tarshish, sleeping through the storm, sinking beneath the waves. Yet from inside the belly of that great fish, surrounded by darkness and the stench of the sea, the prophet did the one thing he had been refusing to do. He prayed. And the God he had fled from heard every word. That is the stubborn grace of the Lord — He listens for us even in the places our rebellion has taken us.