Jonah 2:1-2
Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish’s belly, And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.

There’s no better time to cry out to God than when we find ourselves in the midst of a place we don’t want to be. Sudden trials often have a way of refocusing our attention on God and our need for Him. If Jonah had been able to continue on his way and made it all the way to Tarshish, he may have kept on running and never looked back. He may have spent the rest of his life avoiding God and refusing His call and forsaking His fellowship, afraid to turn back or afraid to do what he had been asked to do. God had to do something to get Jonah’s attention, or He could lose him forever.

Sometimes it’s our afflictions that cause us to cry out to God when we wouldn’t have before. He is waiting to hear from us. And if we need some prompting, God will sometimes send something into our lives that turns our eyes and our hearts back to Him. We remember then in those moments that we need God for everything, that He is our help and our hope and we are foolish to want to run away from Him. We understand a little better, after pushing Him away for a time, that He is the one who sustains us and satisfies us.

And as a result of those trials, we learn that no matter what depth we’ve sunk to or how deep we find ourselves, God will hear us and can deliver us. We can never get far enough away to where He can’t hear our cries. Even in the worst possible circumstances we could ever find ourselves in, God will draw near to us. And once we’ve learned sufficiently the lesson He needed us to learn, we can be totally restored.

Let’s not try to flee from God or run away from something He’s asked us to do. Running from Him may only bring something into our lives that shows us we need to be running to Him instead. But we can be reassured that our disobedience and poor choices do not mean God has cast us aside. He will pursue our hearts to try to draw us back to Him. So let’s respond to the Lord’s chastening in the proper way, repent of our sins and go back to following closely where He leads us.