Then I said, ‘I have been cast out of Your sight;
Yet I will look again toward Your holy temple.’ Jonah 2:4 (NKJV)
This has to be the strangest place from which anyone has ever prayed. Jonah was in the belly of a great fish, he had tried to avoid God and he had done his best to get away from the place where God wanted him to be. It doesn’t get much worse; thrown overboard, swallowed by a fish and now here he is somewhere in the depths of the sea…a hopeless situation?
But there, closed in with no apparent way out Jonah calls out in faith to God and says with confidence “Yet I will look again toward Your holy temple”. If there was ever a time when looking toward the temple was unlikely it was now. But Jonah knew that, even in the desperation of his predicament, God was there and listening. Even though it looked like God had cast him away, he was confident in the power of God to change his situation. Jonah called out to God in the depths of his distress, God supernaturally rescued him and used him to reach an entire city.
No matter where you find yourself today, I’m guessing you’re not in the belly of a fish (though it might seem not a million miles away). Although you might feel like you have been cast out of God’s sight, you can’t go anywhere where He is not.
Call to God, trust in Him – He is right there and you will see the love and power of God in your life.