May 27, 2011

The Whale


ReBlog: ( I did not write this)

"The Whale… If you read a recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth. A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her. When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same".

My thoughts: I think many times in our life, we will run into people who find themselves in tangles just as this whale. And although they may look big or dangerous and sometimes intimidating, their soul cries out for help and it's up to us to decide whether we want to help them or not. By helping them, you may find the satisfaction of "seeing someone through" or maybe you'll just get a high 5. Who knows, but it's definitely worth thinking about. I think God allows us to go through certain experiences in our life just to be able to help someone later on who finds themselves in that same web.

In the wise words of Plato (although I hated philosophy class, but that's beside the point) ... "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle".