If matters of faith are uncomfortable reading, it’s ok to turn the page. There is no intent here to bait and switch.
J. hadn’t fished in years. He caught two bluegill, one channel catfish and three largemouth bass with a Zebco 33, 10-lb., “impossible-to-break” line and an orange shineee hineee jig. As for me, I am fishing most days for most things with the secret influence of God’s spirit.
We read the suggestion of this one morning in the (early 1900s) Presbyterian Book of Common Worship. It is sticky (memorable) counsel because this world and work and so many other things we wake up to see and do every day are hard to untangle.
There was a season when we had a deep portfolio of hotel work. One week we were named brand manager for a new flag. We lost it the next to a Chicago agency that convinced the client that unless their creative team walks past the brand every week, “they don’t know what they don’t know.”
I am finally wise enough to accept that this is generally true. We don’t know what we don’t know. I want who I am and what I do to be marked by excellence, not ugly knots, but it is unfathomably hard today to stay neat on the spool of life. Too many complexities, hardships, injustices, absurdities. Casting on our own into inscrutable places and spaces … trying to be of help in them is fishing’s empty creel.
For anything in my life to be masterful, it must be masterfull. Instruct and teach me in the way I should go. This secret line of counsel has powerful memory and helps us regain our shape when bent or hold up when scratched and tested by the rocks.
As I’m asking for masterfull, I always add a postscript: please help me catch this, catch up, catch the big idea in minutes instead of hours. And this reminds me that while J. was fishing, my dad shared the story of fishing by hand in holes along streams when he was a boy. (Do not try!) Masterful is the hand that feeds you.
