July 2

In My Distress I Called To The Lord

From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. He said: In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry. You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. I said, I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple.

Jonah 2:1 -4 

Jonah’s story is not uncommon; his experience has been replayed in many situations and many cultures throughout the world. After hearing God’s call, he ran away, thinking he could escape the obligation he knew was his. That obligation was to reach out to others with the gospel.

Roy Ahmaogak ran away from the call of God in 1936. Roy’s story begins when he was born in Barrow, Alaska in 1898. His mother was an unmarried Inupiat Eskimo and his father a Portuguese whaler, a man Roy never knew. His mother gave birth, as was the custom, in very trying circumstances: “When I was born,” he later reflected, “our people thought a woman was unclean when she gave birth. So when the time came for my mother to deliver me, she was taken out of her warm sod house and put inside a small snow igloo.”

During the next four days, food and water were handed in through a tiny opening. It was a precarious way to enter the world. Roy’s nine older brothers and sisters had all died very young, so, in his mother’s eyes, Roy was very special.

Presbyterian missionaries had come to Barrow when Roy was a young child and his mother and adoptive father were among the first believers. His mother was a sincere Christian and was certain that God was calling her young son into ministry. Roy recognized this call, but he was far more interested in going on exciting hunts with his dogs.

When an invitation came from a missionary medical doctor for Roy to accompany him and preach the gospel on his distant rounds, Roy shrunk from what he knew to be the voice of the Lord. He “fled to an isolated fish camp on the Beaufort Sea.” Here he could hide from God and enjoy the excitement of an Alaskan seal hunt with his friend. Their dogs carried them far out on the ice, and they were successful in their hunt.

As evening approached they headed home, and suddenly they realized that the wind had changed directions. They were headed into a blinding blizzard, facing the most dreaded terror of all; being caught on an island of ice. Late the next day, “they reached the landward edge of the ice island and found what Roy had feared—open sea.” For the next three days their lives hung in the balance.

Would they drift at sea and freeze to death, or would the wind change direction and bring them to land? It was there on the ice that Roy committed his life to God. The wind changed direction and their lives were spared. Roy went on to be a great preacher among his people and a translator of the Inupiat New Testament. ²