My daughter grew up a vegetarian. She’s never had a hamburger or a piece of chicken or even one little bite of smoked Alaskan salmon.
HOW could anyone go HUNTING? she’d wonder. And FISHING?? Just the thought of all those shiny, slimy things thrashing around on the bottom of the boat could make her shudder.
Which is why I couldn’t help but smile when she married into a family that not only EATS fish… They FISH. In ALASKA. Every summer. And why I did more than smile when she told me a few days ago that this summer, SHE is going fishing, too.
“Wow!” I said. “That will be a lot of really hard, physical work!”
“I think I’ll do fine,” she reassured me, “once I get past all the fish.”
We both laughed, because, of course the fish are the point.
It reminded me of a day, early in my nine years on staff at a boarding academy, when a few of the kids had been a little, well, difficult. “This job would be great,” I quipped to a fellow staff member, “if it weren’t for all the teenagers.” (We smiled. The kids were the point. We loved those kids!)
It also reminds me of the time I heard someone wondering what to do with some of the new church members that had come in through a recent evangelistic series. I don’t remember exactly what the concerns were, but I got the idea that these people were messing things up. You know how new people can mess things up — They have all these crazy ideas about what might be fun at the Saturday night social, and they bring scary-looking things to potluck, and they throw off the long-established seating arrangement for church. Their new-to-Sabbath School kids can create havoc, not to mention that some of them have habits and social lives that are, well, complicated.
When Jesus used fishing as an analogy for soul winning, I imagine He was simply using something familiar to the fishermen to illustrate the new focus of their lives. When it comes to casting the vision of gathering in a lot of people – and that it takes a lot of work – the imagery is profound. Maybe an additional point is that fishing can be messy. (The cross sure was.) But those “messy” people… they’re the point, right?
We love people, of course, and we love it when they come to the Lord and to our church. It’s just that in some circumstances we don’t know quite how to live out that love. As you have observed new members being assimilated into the life and, yes, culture of our church, what have you observed? Has it ever required some extra wisdom, some extra love? What did love look like under those circumstances?
Were you once one of those “messy” fish? Are you still? What did people do, or do you wish they would do, to help you transition into the Christian life and into the church?
PS It is likely that my daughter will be on the boat as you read this… Say a prayer for her! J
Re Cheri Corder’s fishy perspectives blog, I remember when I was a boy loving to go fishing with my dad, but not much interested in cleaning them afterwards. I also appreciate that in the Christian life we’re primarily called to catch the fish; the Holy Spirit’s job is to clean them. Nice piece, Cheri.