But We Caught Fish

Fishing is a wonderful personal pastime that I often dream of but have little time to do. Last Friday was the exception to the rule. My college-age grandson Daniel knows where to go and how to catch fish. He invited me to accompany him on his regular weekly adventure onto one of northern New Jersey’s pristine reservoirs. In a departure from focusing on the headlines, allow me to share the story.

We arrived at Split Rock Reservoir at 7 AM on a cloudless day, carried the aluminum rowboat down the steep rustic launch, loaded the gear, including an electric trolling motor and three heavy-duty 12-volt car batteries, and shoved off from the rocks lining the shore.

A troll along the eastern shore got me a nice bass, the first of seven respectable fish including bass and pickerel. Daniel managed to outfish me nine to seven. At lunchtime, we sat on one of the several picturesque islands located in the two and a half-mile long lake. Nesting Canadian geese and various other waterfowl made the day a valuable nature study in addition to landing the fighting fish.

Since no gas motors are allowed on the reservoir, the three car batteries naturally divided the day into a timely recreational triad: one to motor down the lake, one for the day’s fishing, and one to churn our way back to the launch site.

Battery number two outlasted our expectations, and we were heading slowing windward up the west coast in late afternoon when the electric motor stopped abruptly. Daniel identified the problem as a burned out switch, which meant human power alone would get us to the launch well over a quarter of a mile away.

Daniel had rigged a convenient and back-saving set of floorboards across the boat seats, which is wonderful for standing and fishing but which makes conventional rowing impossible. So, we each took a hefty oar and began rowing, standing and paddling like canoeists but laboring hopelessly against the water and the wind, which had whipped up earlier in the afternoon.

Exhausted but longing for home, Daniel volunteered to go overboard and tow the boat along the shoreline walking in a couple of feet of water. This was ideal for me as the passenger, but overhanging branches came straight toward me at eye level. Several branches were successfully diverted from poking me in the eye until one brushed my face. In a flash, it caught my glasses and ripped them from my face before I had a chance to even grab them. They were gone! And they weren’t in the boat!

Peering earnestly out into the water some feet deeper than his boat-towing depth, Daniel said, “I can see them. Let me try to hook them with my spinner rig.” And he did. My glasses and the clip-on sunshades were still intact. I put them on, even peering through wisps of seaweed, grateful to see clearly again. And Daniel trudged on.

“We can get out closer than where we left,” Daniel proposed. “I’ll go and drive the van over while you unload stuff from the boat.” It was closer, but it was a lot longer distance to the roadway and much steeper and now so very hot in the blazing sun. He left, and I began carrying things up the slope, sweating as I went up and down and swatting tiny black flies that inflicted a severe and lingering itch. The van arrived, and we finished emptying the boat, and then inched the 12-foot rowboat up the steep slope.

What a time! We hadn’t planned on all the post-fishing stress, and I suppose in retrospect it makes for a great recovery and a great story.

My point in all this? As we were heading home in the air-conditioned van, I glanced through my weed-streaked glasses over at Daniel, who was still wet from the waist down, and we agreed on one thing: “But we caught fish!” That was why we went, and we had achieved our purpose. The other stuff was incidental and, therefore, tolerable.

Fishing in the ancient time of Jesus was troublesome, too, but men’s physical nourishment and livelihoods depended on it. Bad weather on Galilee often threatened fishermen’s lives. Nets broke and had to be untangled and mended. The work was backbreaking and tiring, and sometimes it was done in the hours of darkness. Once, some of Jesus’ disciples had fished all night without catching any fish and then had to throw the net another time on the other side of the boat at Jesus’ command (John 21:6).

But it was all worth it even beyond commercial purposes because the grueling hardships taught them spiritual truth. The obstacles would be great, the road rough, the climb steep, and the detractors many, but they would catch fish—not merely the finned variety but the faith species who would come to the Savior through their message of the death and resurrection of the Master Fisherman who commissioned them by Galilee’s shores for global waters. As Priscilla J. Owens wrote, “Climb the steeps and cross the waves, Onward! ’tis our Lord’s command—Jesus saves! Jesus saves!”

“But we caught fish!” I can hear even now as I write this and even scratch a few bug bites. Spiritual fishing is always good as Christ promised. “Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). “From now on you will catch men” (Luke 5:10). On the promise of Christ, the success of the Christian mission has always hung.

Years ago, I wrote in the flyleaf of my Bible, “Facing the hardships of this ministry is worth healing the heartaches of this world.” The most important words of the fishermen are not the descriptions of obstacles but the fish that were caught.

The purpose of fishing is to catch fish. Everything else is incidental. It is true on the lakes of life and the seas of evangelism.

Dave Virkler