His Love Frees

Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea

2 Corinthians 11:25

I wonder how many televangelists could relate to the long list of sufferings listed by Paul. He was whipped, stoned, imprisoned, beaten, jailed – unimaginable hardships. And then there’s a simple but quick reflection: “I spent a night and a day in the open sea.”

He knew his calling in God and the Holy Spirit had a purpose in his life. And yet for 24 hours this special man of God found himself immersed in the arms of an oceanic swell, physically and violently smashed around by waves, struggling to breathe as the water poured over him – and that’s just the daytime. At night he would have been surrounded by a hulking darkness and who knows his turmoil, as he peered into the blackish depths beneath his frail frame, thrashing for life. 

Surely, and I am conjecturing, a single thought came to his mind again and again. “Any second  now and God will get me out of this.” Yet he kept on struggling for eternal moments, hour after hour, as the Sun went down and darkness fell. A lone man invisible to the naked eye, turning in a churning swell. It must have felt like a kind of death. 

What did Paul cling to most of all during those 24 hours? A piece of wood? Some kind of first century lifejacket? I imagine it was a promise. The knowledge that God has previously intervened directly in his life, calling him. Perhaps that’s what he clung to more than anything. He hoped in God to get him out of that hellhole in his own way and in his own time. He put his faith there and meanwhile held on for dear life until the situation changed. After a night and a day in the open sea.

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