Many of us know the story.  It's the story of Jonah, the prophet who was swallowed by a "great fish" and, after spending three nights in its belly, was released.  So you may ask, how did Jonah end up in the belly of the "great fish"?  Earlier, God had told ("the word of the Lord came to Jonah") Jonah to journey east to Nineveh, the capital of the mighty and much feared Assyrian Empire and call them to repentance.  With a well deserved reputation for rapacity and cruelty, the Assyrian Empire was, in its heyday, the most powerful nation in the ancient Near East (what we call the Middle East today).  Every spring, its king and his armies ventured forth, moving across the deserts of Mesopotamia in pursuit of conquest, ever seeking to overwhelm and destroy all who stood in their way. And until the Babylonians toppled Nineveh in 612 B.C., no one could stop them.
     Hence, we cannot be surprised that Jonah was reluctant to go to Nineveh.  The Assyrians had no soft feelings for Israelites, and Jonah did not see how calling them to repentance would change that.  So he ran away.  He ran to the port city of Tarshish, got on a ship, and set west across the Mediterranean Sea.
     But God's eyes, as many a Jewish rabbi says, are everywhere.  Very soon, a storm swept across the sea, threatening to capsize the ship.  Knowing very well why the storm had come, Jonah told the ship's crew to throw him overboard.  They did.  And the storm stopped.
     Here we come to the heart of my thought.  As he languished in the fish's belly, Jonah prayed.  He told God that God heard his voice and that he would not abandon him.  He told God that he knew God would journey to the deepest depths of the earth to follow and redeem him.  It is likewise for us.  The ubiquity of God ensures that no matter what we do, no matter where we go, and no matter what we think, God is everywhere, watching and listening. And it's not an Orwellian 1984 type of watching and listening.  It's a watching and listening of love and concern, a focus of entirely good intention.
     We all will wander in our lives, looking for meaning in futile places.  Given God's omnipresence, however, and given his steady watchful care, though life is full of vanity and dead ends (as well as immense joy and delight), we can know that purpose continues to roam through it.  The world can be very capricious, and we can be exceedingly foolish, yes, but God is neither.  In an intentional world, God's intended world, we can mine everything for point and meaning.  While we may not see these right away, we can believe, as did Jonah, that because God is there, they are, too.