There aren’t too many people who know exactly what Jonah experienced in the guts of that fish. And there aren’t too many people who can appreciate what it feels like to be spewed out of a fish onto the dry land. In a metaphorical sense, in a figurative sense, many of us can perhaps understand it.
But it seems that a man named Paul Templer can understand Jonah in a very concrete sense. In London’s Guardian newspaper this past week, Mr. Templer offered a first-person account of an experience he had on the Zambezi river in Zimbabwe. The title of the newspaper piece was this: “I was swallowed by a hippo.”
Paul Templer owns a business that takes clients on tours of the Zambezi River near Victoria Falls. And many times over the years he has seen a particular, grouchy two-ton bull hippopotamus in the stretch of river he often travelled – a bull hippo that occasionally went after tourists and guides in a half-hearted kind of way. Continue reading
encrusted words 