Saved by a turtle.

Sea Turtles can grow to weigh about 400kgs but usually average about 150 – 200kgs depending on the species. They inhabit warmer waters, and the females are well known for their ability to navigate unerringly every year through trackless oceans to tiny islands where they were born. There they lay eggs in the sand and return to the sea to wander thousands of kilometers before returning to the same island the next year.

27-year-old South Korean Chung Nam Kim may have been one of the luckiest guys ever. He had been working aboard the Liberian ship Federal Nagara as a deckhand and painter. At some point between 2 and 3 am, Kim found himself suffering from a bad headache and decided that it would be best to go up on deck and grab some fresh air.

Suddenly, his foot slipped and Kim fell into the Pacific Ocean. No one witnessed his plunge, so he was as good as dead. Kim started swimming for land, but it was obvious that there was no way that he could ever make it.

“I was very afraid. I thought that I was dying… I couldn’t think of anything else. I was too exhausted.”

Just at the point when he was about to give up, he spotted something in the water.

“I thought I was dead. And then I touched this thing, and I first thought that it might be a shark and then I saw it was a turtle, so I held on.”

He threw his arm around the turtle and paddled slowly with the other arm. For the whole time that Kim clung to the turtle, the sea creature did not dive under the water. Eventually he spotted what looked like a ship. It was the Swedish freighter Citadel, which was 182 km from the Nicaraguan coast at the time. He started waving his arms frantically to get their attention. At 4:45pm that Friday, the crew of the Citadel spotted a man with his arm around a large turtle and pulled him out of the water. Fifteen hours after he fell overboard Kim was taken aboard and almost immediately passed out from exhaustion.

Could this be a whale of a fish story? Most likely not. Both the captain and the crew of the Citadel said that they had seen Kim clinging to the turtle. One crew member even managed to snap a few photographs of the rescue.

Wonderful are the ways in which God sometimes acts to preserve individuals from injury and death, and we have a fascinating example of the way he works to save them physically in the story of the Korean sailor. But, eager as God is to save people physically, He is far, far more concerned with their eternal destiny. When He preserves people, like the Korean sailor by using a turtle, or Jonah by using a big fish, He does so in order that eventually they might be willing to do his will.

Very few of us have been kept from injury and death as dramatically as were Jonah or the Korean sailor. But God has in many ways preserved us that we also might learn of His love and serve him fully.