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I’m three miles from home on a cold October afternoon; it’s getting dark, and the wind is picking up. I’m wet and feeling hypothermic. My leaky waders are heavy and sloshing with water. To get home I have to cross the river three times, climb over barbed wire, and push my way through heavy brush. And I haven’t caught a single fish.

Why do I do this? I mutter. There are no fish in this river. This is a stupid sport. This is when I learn what it means to be a fisherman.

Nobody really knows if he’s a fisherman until the fish stop biting.

For people who find it easy to resist slimy hands covered with fish entrails, this may seem hard to believe, but there is such a thing as being a fisherman.

Lots of people like fishing when the fish are biting. Only a few will fish when they aren’t. The former are simply people who like to catch fish, the latter are fishermen.

Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve found places to fish. In Southern California, I surf fished and back-packed to high mountain lakes. When I lived in Boston, I fished the Atlantic. When I lived in Central California, I fished in the mountains and off the coast. Now that I’ve died and gone to heaven (now that I live in Montana), I fish in a river 300 yards from my back door. I’m not even sure I like fishing all that much. But I am a fisherman. So I fish.

I didn’t understand this until that cold October dusk. Only when you’re thoroughly beaten by river and weather can you decide if you’re truly a fisherman or just somebody who likes to catch fish.

There is such a thing as being a pastor. It goes deeper than what I think most people mean by the term call. Call is certainly part of it, but a pastor’s call is often only the beginning-an invitation to minister. The call gets you into the ministry, but once you are there, you find out if you truly are a pastor.

You discover you are a pastor only through circumstances that test every fiber of your being. Only when you mutter, Why am I doing this? There are no responsive souls in this town. Pastoral ministry is a stupid career, can you discover the truth. Only then is there any hope of knowing yourself to be a pastor.

Pastoring two churches simultaneously for the last eight years has been instructive in the ways of the Spirit. I’ve had time to see things heat up and cool down in both churches. Attendance has gone up and down in both. I have seen times when prayers were dramatically answered, people were coming to Christ, and the results were visible. But rarely did all these things happen in both churches at the same time.

I try my best to perform my duties for each church with equal attention and skill. So there’s something more than professionalism or faithfulness going on. There are seasons of the Spirit (and none are to be despised). We don’t like drought. When it comes, most of us immediately assume it must be our fault. I don’t want to oversimplify, but quite honestly, I don’t seem to have too much to do with the seasons of responsiveness in my churches.

Beginners in fishing think it’s their fault when the fish don’t bite. They anxiously look for the perfect fly. They look for new water. Real fishermen know nothing is wrong with their bait or location. They just keep fishing.

The simplest lesson in fishing is the hardest to accept: sometimes the fish are biting, and sometimes they aren’t.

If you’ve gone to great lengths to take a certain day off, and driven a hundred miles to get to the right water, and the fish aren’t biting, you might as well spend the day fishing anyway. Why lose your composure? You’re fishing.

At least that’s your attitude if you’re really a fisherman.

When you’ve invested years becoming a pastor and no one seems to be responding to your ministry, that’s when you discover if you’re really a pastor.

When the Spirit in the church is a faint whisper, when prayers aren’t being answered dramatically, when the congregation isn’t growing, when church members’ central nervous systems are not being involuntarily stimulated (when people aren’t excited), we pastors think it’s our fault. We anxiously look for the perfect program. When we run out of ideas, we’re ready to give up.

But God may want us to keep fishing.

I never finished the story with which I began. Even when I’m wet, cold, exhausted, and angry at not catching fish, I keep fishing on the way home. More than once, that’s when I catch the big one.

This is true of pastoring as well. When my ministry is flat, when I am fed up with being a pastor but keep on doing it, not from decision, not from duty, not from guilt, but from being, more than once that is the circumstance in which God has invaded my ministry with his Spirit in a powerful and demonstrative way.

I’m not sure how to describe it unless after a fruitless and frustrating day you’ve seen an eighteen-inch Leviathan sip your fly and tug it into chaos. With all your might you pull the musclebound monster out of the deep and into your hands. A powerful calm comes from holding Tiamat in your hands.

God is not only in the catching. God is in the fishing.

David Hansen pastors The Florence-Carlton Community Church and The Victor Federated Church and lives in Florence, Montana.

Leadership Spring 1991 p. 146