Fishing

The lake was gorgeous after the cool of the early spring morning. Norma Jean and I stirred up lemonade and fixed a large thermos of coffee while the men retrieved the fishing rods from under the deck. When we women walked down to the beach area, I could hear Wally and his father mumbling a foreign language of crappie plugs, long jig shanks and minnows. Norma Jean, Wally's mother, set the drinks on a tiny garden table in the sand and motioned for me to follow her up under the deck. We found four ratty lawn chairs and soon were lining them up parallel to the water's edge. She sat in the far left chair, right beside the drinks table, and as I sank down beside her, she handed me a glass of lemonade, my preferred poison when I was that age, one month past twenty-one.

I sipped absentmindedly on the tart treat while watching Wally with my full infatuation. He baited a hook with a minnow, something I thought extremely cruel and yukky in principle, but when done by him seemed almost heroic. Then he walked towards me with the fishing rod. "Stand up and I'll teach you to cast," he said.
"Cast?" I was new at this fishing thing and not at all sure I wanted to learn to cast. After all, baiting the hook had been pretty disgusting.
"Yeah, silly, cast. You don't have to look so petrified - it's easy."
So I stood up and walked nearer to the water. I wondered if he would do the stand behind my back and put his arms around me to teach me kind of thing. I almost swooned thinking about it and then remembered his parents and said loudly, "I'm not scared. Of course it's easy."
"Shhh," the men rebuked. "You'll scare the fish away."
"And that would be bad?" I grinned just a little, tilting my head to see if his mother would grin, too. She did.
"Joy." Wally wasn't grinning. "Do you want to learn to fish, or not?" Of course, I knew what he really meant was I want you to learn to fish because I like fishing and fishing is fun and later you women can clean this fish and cook it for us.
"Yes, yes, I do," I fibbed.
So began the lesson on casting, and after about fifteen tries, I finally cast far enough out to leave the line in. Then I sat down in my chair like Mr. Irwin had done long before, right after his first cast landed way out there. As soon as I was settled, Wally threw his minnow-weighted line way out there, too, and slowly sat. I handed him a glass of lemonade and asked, "What do we do now?"
"Wait."
"For what?"
"For a fish to bite."
"How long do we wait?"
"Well, as long as it takes."
"How long is that? What do we do while we wait?"
"What do you mean, 'do while we wait'?"
"Well, I don't know. You're the one who fishes, not me."
"We just wait, quietly."
"Oh."
At this, I turned to Norma Jean who was staring into her coffee as if there might be some message from God in the bottom of the cup. She wouldn't look me in the eye, so I knew she had known all along I was going to hate fishing. She just hadn't had the nerve or the heart to tell me.

Just about that time, I felt a gentle tug on my fishing pole. "I - I think I got a fish," I stammered.
"Really?" Wally was incredulous. "You?"
"Yeah, look, it's pulling on my line!" My voice was rising even as I was rising out of my chair.
Wally hopped up beside me, softly barking instructions. "Give the rod a sharp jerk, and then reel the baby in."
I jerked on the line a little less than sharply so as not to hurt the fish too much Then I deftly turned about face while placing the rod over my shoulder like an infantryman's rifle. I marched up the beach towards the house, keeping my eye over my shoulder so I could see when the fish cleared land. When I had him up even with the chairs, I dropped the rod and raced back towards the others, yelling, "I caught a fish, I caught a fish!"
Norma Jean just stared at me with mouth agape, but the guys whooped and guffawed, slapped their knees and shouted.
"Shhh," I warned, "you'll scare the other fish away." Then I leaned down to take a look at my first fish ever. It was covered in sand but beautiful all the same.

Jesus said, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men." We don't have to know how to do everything just right in order to tell someone about Jesus. We just need to do it because every soul is beautiful to Christ, even the sand-covered ones.