Ever gone fishing?...

I remember when I was a young girl and my sisters had both moved from home were married and beginning their own families and I was at home alone with my mom and dad. I remember how my dad enjoyed fishing and he had bought himself a boat and a couple of times we would pack the tent and off we went to the lake for the weekend. It didn't happen that often, but I remember one time in particular we went to Rock Lake. Really I should have been too old to go with mom and dad, but I was one of those weird children who liked hanging around with my parents. They were and still are pretty cool.

I was not much of a fisherman, but I enjoyed sitting in the boat with my dad, even though he would get a little huffy when I would throw my line out right when he was turning the boat around. You all know what happens then right?

Well, the motor would come out of the water and Dad would try very politely to untangle my line. Or, I would throw my line out straight into a bunch of weeds or bulrushes and again Dad would come to the rescue, though usually by the third or fourth time he was maybe a little less patient and a little more huffy.

My mom and dad would clean and fillet the fish that they had caught and my dad would get the little hibachi going and with a special flour coating the fish would soon be sizzling in huge mounds of butter.

I don't ever remember catching a fish worth keeping, but my dad did and I knew come supper time there would be fish frying in the old cast iron frying pan. I was content sitting beside mom and dad at the picnic table as they enjoyed their fresh fried fish and I would be eating a hot dog. I never went for the fishing because I really don't like seafood, but it was a great time to spend with my mom and dad.

My dad doesn't go fishing anymore but the memories will always be there.

Why am I thinking of this now? Well, this past week has been a real struggle and though God asked me to completely open up my heart and life to him years ago when I accepted him into my heart I did not fully understand what that really was supposed to look like. Bear with me, I'm getting there.

I have had a lot of time to sit and think this past weekend, with Wes battling a tough cold (he's feeling much better by the way) he slept a lot of the time. And Sunday afternoon while I was sitting by myself and thinking over the past week I realized that even though I think I'm doing the best I can to handle the situation we are in without it turning into a blind panic, I wasn't doing very well. My mind kept gong to the extreme, I wasn't trusting, I thought I was, but I wasn't. You think you have everything, good and bad, figured out, but you don't.

I'm a worrier, I've got my trigger finger on the panic button and I found two grey hairs and I earned both of them, so I'm keeping them!

Well, I asked God pretty directly what he expected and he reminded me of those fishing trips. Why? I pictured my mom and dad working together to scale and fillet those fish. Carefully carving out the best pieces of meat, cautiously ensuring that the tiny little bones were removed. And oh man, how they enjoyed eating that fish afterward.

Is that what God is doing? I believe that's exactly what he's doing, he's carefully cutting away the scaly sinful parts of who we are and keeping only the best pieces so He (and others around us) can enjoy who we become as he continues his work in us. It's a never ending process that we must go through while we are on the earth, because it's here that we will never be perfect. It's easy to say that we shouldn't panic, that we need to trust, in fact it looks great when you read it in black and white in the Bible...so, why is it still so hard?

"For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—" Romans 6:6