Now That's a Big Fish!

Jonah I ain't, but I been close to where he went.

Since we are gluttons for punishment, Valerie and I decided to get the fam up at 6:00 this morning so we could drive to Gloucester for a whale watching expedition. (Let me say here that I'm not going to have any pictures in this blog of the whales because I haven't pulled them off the camera yet. I will put up a separate blog for those pictures.) Alex has this idea that she wants to train dolphins and orcas when she grows up and gets big. She is our easiest child, and it's easy for us to overlook her. Alex is very content to go with the flow, and she does a fabulous job of helping out with Braden. For those of you who may need this down the road, she is going to be a wonderful babysitter in a few years. She will be 10 on August 9th--hard to believe, huh? Anyway, in spite of the fact that we live in landlocked Medaryville, Indiana, she wants to be a marine biologist (much like George Castanza, only with actual education) and train these wonderful creatures. When Valerie and I saw the brochure for the whale watching tour we both knew that Alex would absolutely love it. There was an 8:30 a.m. tour and a 2:30 p.m. tour. Not knowing which time of the day would provide optimal whale activity, we decided that we could get everybody up and around early if we also got to bed at a decent time.

With that in mind, we made sure to have the kiddies in bed and settled down by about 11:00. I guess the intent was there. When Braden is being silly, it's hard for any of us to ignore him and settle down because he is so funny. I've taken to calling him Puerco, which is spanish for pig, because he is such a ham. He's a lot like Uncle Ed Fetla--when he knows you're laughing at him, he just goes on and on. He usually goes overboard and winds up crying, also much like Ed. Military officers--what a bunch of sissies. Just kidding, Fetlas!

According to the 7 Seas Whale Watching tour brochure, they offered a guarantee that we would see whales. The lady on the intercom told us that sometimes they only see a whale or two lazily swimming along, other times they see incredible aerial displays of dolphins and whales, and most days are somewhere in between. If there was a rating scale of 1 to 10, with one being a trip with nary a whale, and 10 being the aerial variety of trip, our whale watching experience would have been a 9. God blessed us with an incredible display of the power, beauty, and majesty of the humpback whale. I'm sure there are people who believe the story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale is ridiculous, because no whale could swallow a person. Let me tell you, folks, the whales we saw today could swallow a dadgum Volkswagon van.

We skipped along through the ocean at about 17 knots for an hour, then slowed so the captain and crew could look for blowholes. You can see the spout from a humpback whale from over a mile away. Somebody spotted a blow, and we tore off in that direction. We came upon a single humpback that, I swear, God must have put in that location just to show us a good time. That sucker rolled over on its back, flopped its flippers, slapped its tail, and even breached once. There are few things that compare with seeing a 40' whale that weighs about 20 tons propel itself halfway out of the water. The nice lady on the intercom told us the flipper of a humpback whale is about 12 feet long and weighs almost a ton. That whale floated along on its back with both flippers in the air, then it would slap the water on both sides, which made a thunderous SMACK! The crazy thing stayed in the same spot and put on this display for close to half an hour. I took almost 150 pictures with the new EOS. It has a setting that lets you take pictures rapidly by holding down the button, just like an automatic rifle. My hope was that if I fired off six or seven shots, one of them would be good. I will allow you to be the judge of that when I upload some tomorrow, but I am satisfied that the camera worked well and the strategy was sound.

An effective way to spot feeding whales is to look for seabirds, as they feed on the leftover bits that feeding whales invariably strew about. After the first whale display came to an end, our guides spotted intense seabird activity off in the distance, so we made our way over there, and once again we were blessed with an incredible show. At some point in time during the next hour, our Lady of the Intercom told us that they very rarely come across that level of activity. Over the next hour we watched as many as seven or eight humpbacks, minkes, and finbacks feeding all at the same time in the same place. Their techniques are impressive. Often they submerge, blow a ring or line of bubbles, and swim up through the bubbles with their mouths open to engulf a huge amount of their food of choice. They take in enormous amounts of food and seawater at a single gulp, then filter out the water using the baleen in their mouths, because whales can't swallow saltwater any more than humans can. Humpback eat small fish, krill, shrimp, and so forth. Their favorite thing to eat is a small eel about six or seven inches long that swims about is enormous schools of millions. Another method humpbacks use is to swim along the surface with their mouths open in a technique called snaking. They also slap the water with their tails or flippers. Apparently the impact of the slap stuns their prey in the area, allowing the whale to swim through the impact area and enjoy a veritable fishy buffet. Humpback whales take in between 2000 and 3000 pounds of food EVERY DAY! Humpbacks only eat six months out of the year. They migrate to an area about 800 miles off the island of Haiti for breeding and calving every year, and during the six months they spend migrating and enjoying themselves in the Caribbean they do not eat anything.

I don't know what more I could say about the whales, and I know any type of description I could give will not do them justice, nor will pictures. They are incredible, beautiful, powerful creatures. I feel sorry for those people who just have to believe that humans and whales have a common ancestor because both species are mammals. It must be incredibly frustrating to believe something so strongly that has absolutely not a shred of evidence. When a person chooses to believe that God does not exist, and therefore the Bible of necessity cannot be right, they are pretty much compelled to latch onto any theory that might explain why God is wrong.

Folks, I am going to take a moment here to speak to any of you out there in cyberland who have not yet made the decision to allow Jesus Christ to take control of your life. God loves you, and the proof of that is that He sent His Son, His only Son, His Beloved Son, to die for you. Sin is anything you say, do, or think that displeases a Holy and Just God. Being holy, He cannot tolerate sin in His presence, and the mark He set for us to get into heaven is perfection. By our human nature, we miss that mark on a daily basis. As such, the penalty we earn--yes, even deserve--is an eternity apart from our Creator. But God does forgive sin--the requirement He has to overlook and forget about our sin is blood. In the days of Moses, God allowed His chosen people to sacrifice animals and sprinkle their blood on the altar, whereby God would forgive their sins and restore them to Himself. They had to do it continually, over and over, always knowing that they had this requirement. In time, God remedied this situation by sending His Son to earth. Jesus Christ lived a perfect live, never sinned, and yet was hated by the religious elite of His day. As a result, those men convinced Christ's own people to demand that His life be taken on the cross. Pontius Pilate, the Roman authority in Jerusalem in that day, initially refused to carry out the punishment because it was clear to him that Jesus had done nothing deserving of punishment, much less death. Pilate's own wife told him to have nothing to do with the judgement. But, fearing an uprising by the people, Pilate condemned Jesus Christ to die the typical Roman death for people convicted of capital crimes--crucifixion. And this was God's plan. From the very start, that was the script that God had in place. The proof of that is the 300+ prophecies in the Bible that pointed to the very event. Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, shed His blood so that anyone who chooses to believe that He was God's Son, and His death on the cross was sufficient to cover your sin, can be forgiven. When you choose to trust Christ, God sees your life through the blood of Jesus Christ. The devil, that great accusor, stands at the throne of God and says, "That stinking Mike McKay is a liar, a thief, an idolator, a cheater, and he has broken every one of the commandments thousands of times over. If anyone deserves death, it is he." But here is the beauty of Jesus Christ. When the devil accuses a believer, Christ is there to say, "You are wrong. I took his sin upon my shoulders on the cross, and my blood covers it all. I choose to see Mike as holy, just as I am Holy."

The world wants you to believe that being a Christian is stupid. Only a fool would choose to believe that the Bible is anything but an alagorical set of tales. But here's the deal--1 Corinthians 1:18 tells us this, "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." It does indeed seem foolish to the world that a person would choose to believe that a man who died 2000 years ago could make any difference to anyone in 2007.

But to me, friend, it is far more foolish to believe that I am a cousin to the mighty humpback whale. For God to be wrong, the world has to be right.
Please, please, consider that God's way is the best way! It's not hard to become a follower of Jesus Christ. You don't have to start going door, or go to the mission field in South America, or blow yourself up to prove your faithfulness. Romans 10:9 says, "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved."

Even more than I want to continue on this trip to the WoodenBoat school, I want so desperately for my friends to come to love Jesus Christ. For many of you reading this, I have prayed for years that the truth of the gospel would become real to you, and you would want to know Jesus Christ as your Saviour even more than you want air to breathe or water to drink. If you have questions about what I have written, please send me a message to mike@timmservices.com, or give me a call at 219-954-0063. I guarantee you that I will drop whatever I am doing and give you my full attention, because there is nothing more important in this life.

This blog went a direction I never anticipated, but I know that God works in funny ways, and when He gets ahold of you, give Him the wheel! God is not my copilot...He's the pilot.