The Prayer from Platform B

In 1987, a Scottish fisherman named Callum Hendry fell overboard into the North Sea thirty miles east of Aberdeen. The water was forty-two degrees. His crewmates didn't see him go. The trawler's engine drowned out his shouts, and within minutes, the boat's stern light shrank to a pinprick against the black horizon.

Callum later told a reporter from the Press and Journal that he stopped swimming almost immediately. There was nowhere to swim to. The swells rose above his head like dark walls. He had no radio, no flare, no life vest. He had nothing at all — except, as he put it, "a mouth that still worked."

So he prayed. Not the polished prayers of Sunday morning, but the raw, gasping kind — the prayers that come when every other option has been swallowed by the sea. He prayed to a God he had mostly ignored since boyhood. He begged the Almighty to hear him from whatever cold deep he was sinking into.

A passing vessel spotted him ninety minutes later, hypothermic but alive.