“Oh, yuck!”
My daughter Laura stepped back and pinched her nose as I broke the neck of a hefty catfish, spilling its entrails into a blood-splattered bucket. Small price to pay for inch-thick, fresh fillets.
Small price, too, for building a relationship with the third fisher on this expedition, Jeremy.
Yesterday, sitting in my office for the first time, he wore a just-try-to-figure-me-out expression on his face. A high school senior, he came, he said, “just to keep peace with my mother.” Two days before, Jeremy had been expelled for pulling a hunting knife on a classmate.
“So, why did you do it?” I asked.
Silence.
“What was going on in your thinker when you made your move?”
More silence.
“Look, I just want to be your friend,” I said, but the words felt hollow.
“Prove it,” his eyes said, then shifted to the wall on my right.
For more than an hour I tried to get through to him. But I felt like I was rowing around an island, getting a general view of things but not finding a place to land.
“I have a girlfriend at school,” he said. They talk some, but not too much-afraid to get too close.
“Ever been hurt badly by someone?” I asked.
He admitted that he had, but he wouldn’t talk about it with anyone, not even his mother. Lord, help me, I prayed. This guy doesn’t trust his own mother, much less a probing stranger.
There, he did it again. Something on the wall to my right caught his eye. Oh, of course, the calendar. Nice picture: a swarthy Indian displaying his catch.
Walleyed pike, I think.
I turned away, and then it hit me. I played my hunch.
“You like to fish?”
“Love it.”
“Really?” Thank you, Lord. “Been fishing lately?”
“Naw, not since we moved to town. But when I was a kid, we lived next to the Tensaw River, and I used to go every chance I got. It’s better to go when the water is high, where you can use a boat and set out a trout line overnight. Most of the time I caught catfish that way, and once I caught a fifteen pounder. But if the water is down, you wanna go for bream or bass that hang out around the stumps-course, you hafta know what you’re doing ’cause the water is hot and the fish are sluggish . . .”
On he went for ten minutes and wasn’t even winding down when I interrupted, “It’s been a while since I’ve hung a fish myself. I’ve got a good mind to fool some catfish in the morning. Would you go with me?”
“Are you serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
“I’ll go. What time?”
“Let’s make it seven-thirty, unless that’s too early.”
“Not for me. I’ll buy the wrigglers.”
The next day, we threw the little ones back and kept seven. The net scales tipped seventeen pounds. Jeremy was beaming.
“I’ll clean ’em for you,” he said.
He cleaned the first one, and I the next, tentatively curling my fingers around those dreadful spines.
“Sometime we should go hunting together,” he offered.
Who would have guessed-all this prompted by a picture on a wall calendar! And just two weeks earlier or later, that picture would not have been there.
I knew a Fisherman bigger than both of us was maneuvering the boat.
-Arlin Schrock
Mennonite Christian Fellowship
Atmore, Alabama
Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
