2 Miracles And A Warning: The Day The Sea Spoke

As Americans were gathering with their families and giving thanks, the sea was giving us something of its own: a message to the world. Three stories converged on the same day that, when put together, were hard to ignore if you look for such signs. Tales of desperation, undeniable force, harsh reality and surprising mercy, they combined to paint a picture of nature almost as a living entity attempting to communicate with us, trying to tell us something.

Undeniable Force

With an average of 187 workers killed every day in China, Fan knew he was putting his life on the line at his job on the offshore oil platform. What he didn't expect was to be spending 80 hours trapped in a steel pipe that had been crushed like a tin can by the ocean's immense pressure over fifty feet underwater. But that's what happened when the pipe suddenly squeezed shut by tidal forces, shrinking from 3.3 feet in diameter to just one inch instantly. The man was stuck in the pipe submerged off the coast of eastern Zhejiang province until rescuers were able to lift it from the water and free him using a blowtorch.

Surprising Mercy

On October 5, 2010, Samuel Pelesa and Filo Filo, both 15, and Edward Nasau, 14, set out on a "commute" in their small fishing boat, a jaunt from their home island of Atafu to Nukunonu, two tiny atolls in the South Pacific.
Soon an ordinary trip turned to tragedy as their motor broke down and the boys drifted out to the open sea. After an exhaustive search by the New Zealand Air Force, there was no sign of the teens. Weeks later, the boys were presumed dead and 500 people attended memorial services at their village. But after 50 days adrift, surviving on rainwater, raw fish, a few coconuts and a seagull, the boys were shown some uncharacteristic compassion by the sea as a fishing trawler luckily spotted them. The fact that the castaways were rescued at all was a miracle, but adding to the drama was the fact that the trawler had taken a course it normally would never have taken, a course that literally had them pointed directly at the boys' tiny fishing boat.

Harsh Reality

The reports on the seafood quality in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill seemed a little too rosey to some people. Study after study, test after test by NOAA and so-called independent labs kept coming out, showing the food was safe, that no fish were affected by the oil. They opened thousands of miles of the Gulf back to fishing, saying there was no oil sheen (despite knowing that the oil was trapped at depth) and no seafood tasted or smelled like oil. Well that was blown out of the proverbial water when on November 25th, after a commercial shrimper discovered tar balls in his net, NOAA closed 4,200 miles of the Gulf to shrimping. The agency took pains to say that the the closure was just a precautionary measure, but it is just a symptom of a harsh reality. Fishing for shrimp in that area is done by dragging a net along the bottom of the sea floor. As reported previously, most of the spilled oil stayed at the bottom where it is sitting to this day, and who knows what kind of toxic effects it is having or will have on the sea and its life.

Sending a Message?

The bible says that God moves in mysterious ways, and we have to admit that so does nature. Many people don't believe in coincidences, and those people might say that these three stories, all delivered to us by the cosmos on the same day, cannot be sheer happenstance, that the ocean, nature itself was speaking to us, teaching us lessons. What do you think?

sources: cbsnews.com, vancouversun.com, underwatertimes.com

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