Every school morning in my grandmother’s house began with the same sound: the sharp, insistent ring of her prayer bell, pulling my siblings and me out of sleep before the sun had fully committed to rising.
By the time we were dressed in our uniforms and eating breakfast, only one thing stood between us and school: Superbook – Christian animated series.
The storyline followed Chris, Joy, and their robot friend Gizmo as a mysterious Bible carried them into the stories we were already learning in Sunday school. Suddenly, the people whose names we had heard so often had faces and voices. The stories had color, movement, danger, and emotion.
On mornings when the electricity stayed on, we gathered around the television with breakfast half finished, waiting for our driver, a middle-aged man everyone called Baba Ibeji, to pull up outside. If I am honest, devotion was not the only thing keeping our eyes fixed on the screen. Curiosity had something to do with it. We wanted to know whether the Bible had left anything out.
The Story That Stayed With Me
No episode remained with me quite like Jonah and the great fish.
God instructed Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn its people to turn from their wicked ways. Jonah refused and boarded a ship traveling in the opposite direction. A violent storm arose, terrifying the sailors and threatening everyone on board. Jonah eventually admitted that he was running from God and told the sailors to throw him into the sea.
When they did, the storm became calm.
Jonah, however, disappeared beneath the water. God appointed a great fish to swallow him, and he remained inside it for three days and three nights. After Jonah prayed, the fish released him onto dry land. This time, when God told him to go to Nineveh, he went.
As a child, my questions were not about obedience, repentance, or mercy, which were the lessons my Sunday school teachers probably hoped I would remember. My questions were far more practical.
Why did the fish not digest Jonah? Was there enough air inside it? Did Jonah simply not taste good?
Those may not have been the questions adults expected, but beneath the humor was genuine wonder. What would it feel like to be trapped inside a creature large enough to hold you and powerful enough to end your life whenever it chose?
I never expected to come across anything close to an answer outside Scripture.
Then I read about Michael Packard.
The Diver Inside a Whale’s Mouth
On the morning of June 11, 2021, Michael Packard was diving for lobster off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts. He had been doing the work for approximately 30 years and had entered the water expecting another ordinary day.
At about 45 feet below the surface, he suddenly felt a tremendous impact. Everything went dark.
His first thought was that a shark had attacked him. Then he realized he could not feel any teeth. Nothing was tearing into his body. As he tried to understand what had happened, a horrifying possibility dawned on him.
He was inside the mouth of a humpback whale.
Packard believed the whale was trying to swallow him. He later recalled that his thoughts turned to his wife and two sons because he was convinced he was about to die. For approximately 30 to 40 seconds, he remained trapped in complete darkness, unable to free himself.
Above the water, his fishing partner, Josiah Mayo, watched the surface begin to churn. The whale emerged, shook its head, and hurled Packard back into the sea.
Packard survived with bruising and injuries to his knee, but no broken bones. He walked out of Cape Cod Hospital later that day, shaken, limping, and alive.
Marine experts believe the whale engulfed him accidentally while feeding. Humpback whales consume small fish and have throats too narrow to swallow a human being. Packard never entered the whale’s stomach as Jonah entered the great fish. He was trapped only inside its mouth.
Still, for nearly a minute, he was surrounded by darkness inside a creature powerful enough to end his life. He had no control over what would happen next. That is close enough to Jonah’s experience to make us stop and think.
When Control Is No Longer Ours
What strikes me most when I place these two accounts beside each other is not the size of the creatures. It is the helplessness of the men caught inside them.
Jonah could not outswim the storm that met him while he was running from God. Packard could not overpower an animal that outweighed him by many tons. For a brief and terrifying period, neither man could determine whether he would live or die.
Helplessness is one of the hardest places for the human heart to occupy. We are accustomed to solving problems, making plans, finding alternatives, and searching for an open door. We feel safer when we can see what to do next.
Faith becomes more difficult when every visible option disappears.
It is one thing to trust God when the path ahead is clear. It is another to trust Him when you are surrounded by darkness, unable to move, with no evidence that you will ever see the surface again.
Most of us will never enter the mouth of a whale or the belly of a great fish. Yet many of us know what it feels like to be trapped in a situation we cannot fight, fix, or escape on our own.
It may be a frightening diagnosis, a financial collapse, the death of someone we love, a relationship ending, or the consequences of a decision that cannot be undone. Life can change so suddenly that the ordinary morning we began with confidence becomes the day we discover how little we truly control.
God Is Still Present in the Dark
Jonah’s ordeal resulted from his decision to run from God. Packard’s encounter appears to have been a rare accident in the ocean. Their experiences were not spiritually identical, and Packard’s survival should not be used to make claims about his faith.
Yet together, their stories reveal something deeply human: life can bring us to places where our strength, experience, and plans are no longer enough.
Jonah’s story reminds us that God can reach us even when our own choices have carried us far from where we should be. The great fish was frightening, but it was also the means by which Jonah’s life was preserved. What looked like certain death became an unexpected place of prayer, correction, and another chance.
Packard’s survival reminds us how quickly an ordinary day can place a human life beyond its own control. One moment he was doing familiar work. The next, he was enclosed in darkness, thinking about the family he might never see again.
Neither man remained in the darkness forever.
Faith does not promise that we will never encounter storms, frightening places, or circumstances beyond our control. It assures us that darkness does not place us beyond God’s reach. Even when we cannot see Him working, His presence is not limited by what we can understand.
Perhaps you have survived a season you were certain would break you. You may have emerged bruised, exhausted, and different from the person who entered it. Survival does not always mean returning to who you were before. Sometimes it means discovering a deeper courage, a clearer purpose, and a stronger awareness of grace.
The darkest place in your story does not have to become the final chapter. You may not know how long the night will last or how deliverance will come. Hold on to this truth: the place that has enclosed you cannot contain God.
Some seasons swallow us without warning. Others are entered through our own choices. Either way, God can still meet us there. The darkness may change us, but it does not have the authority to define our ending.
The great fish did not get the final word in Jonah’s story. The whale did not get the final word in Packard’s.
Whatever has surrounded you does not get the final word in yours.
Ogo Adelakun has been writing for 10 years now. When not writing, he loves creating content.
