If you don't believe in miracles, you have to believe this one!
A 29-year-old cook survives three days at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after a shipwreck 20 miles off the coast of Nigeria. Many calls him the 'modern day Jonah.'
"I don't know what stopped the water from filling that room. I was calling on God. He did it. It was a miracle," said Harrison Okene, who was on board the Jascon-4 tugboat when it capsized on May 26, according to Reuters.
As the temperature dropped to freezing, Okene recited the last psalm his wife had sent by text message, sometimes called the Prayer for Deliverance: "Oh God, by your name, save me. ... The Lord sustains my life."
The tugboat capsized due to heavy Atlantic Ocean swells, while stabilizing an oil tanker filling up at the Chevron platform. Of the 12 people on board, divers recovered 10 dead bodies while a remaining crew member has not been found. "As I was coming out of the toilet it was pitch black so we were trying to link our way out to the water tidal (exit hatch)," Okene told Reuters in his home town of Warri, a city in Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta.
Turning away from his only exit, Okene was swept along a narrow passageway by surging water into another toilet, this time adjoining a ship's officers cabin, as the overturned boat crashed onto the ocean floor. To his amazement he was still breathing.
Okene survived, breathing inside a four foot high bubble of air as it shrunk in the waters slowly rising from the ceiling of the tiny toilet and adjoining bedroom where he sought refuge, until two South African divers eventually rescued him.
Okene kept faith with the psalm he recited, that promises to "give thanks in your name, Lord," at a service at his Redeemed Christian Church of God.
To this day, Okene believes his rescue in May is a sign of divine deliverance.
