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“Sometimes it takes only one act of kindness and caring to change a person’s life.”
- Jackie Chan (1954 — ), Chinese actor, stuntman, director
In the context of this piece, there are probably 3 reactions of people who read the arguably sui generis account of Jonah in the short book of the same name in the Old Testament of Holy Writ:
1) Some accept the tale as truth.
2) Some reject the story as factual, but rather consider it fabrication or the result of fevered imagination.
3) Some who accept the possibility but perhaps not the probability that such a thing ever happened.
Jonah, a minor prophet possessed by doubts and flaws of some of us (to his credit he does not try to whitewash himself, but, rather, presents himself as he presumably was, warts and all; while there are some saints in Holy Writ, there are also scoundrels, and some in-between), purportedly spent three days in the belly of a whale. Like the Prodigal Son, the penitent thief, Pinocchio and some of us, he came to his senses and had a life-altering epiphany, which resulted in his being regurgitated and spewed onto dry land, from whence he journeyed to Nineveh, to finish the task from which he had once fled.
He discovered that, as with some other things, one could run but not hide from the Almighty.
Like the Hound of Heaven, as metaphorically described in the 1893 poem by Francis Thompson, the Almighty tracked him down.
