His Love Frees

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air: They do not sow or reap or gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?f

And why do you worry about clothes? Consider how the lilies of the field grow: They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was adorned like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles strive after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Today has enough trouble of its own.

(Luke 12: 22-31)

I went fishing with my little son last Saturday. I have done it myself a few times over the years – out on boats on the North Sea, Irish Sea and English Channel, and a few times as a youngster off beaches and by rivers in Sussex – but it’s been a long time. I had bought myself a new spinning reel for a sea rod given to me by my wife and had been given an assortment of feather baits, weights and the like. But I couldn’t remember how the rod and reel worked. 

At first, my boy and I sat on a rocky outpost further out by the sea shore and had fish and chips while I tried it out. The fishing line got quickly entangled around the reel and I tried in vain to free it. At the same time, my little boy kept having to move our gear away from the fast moving waves approaching us as the current turned. This laborious process happened again and again until I decided we couldn’t beat the pace of the incoming water. 

We headed back up the small cliff and onto the nearby pier and walked along the promenade where we had earlier noticed fishermen by the metal fence overlooking the bay, which encircles where we live. The current had come in fast and the deepness of water swirled over the sand and rocks nearby and below, which just an hour-and-a-half before had been exposed by the previous low tide.  

It seemed a perfect place to try and fish again and I dutifully assembled the rod and reel and whatnot, instructing my boy to feed the line through the guides of the pole. He was jumping up and down with excitement, and I fed the baited line down – only to find once again that I couldn’t pull it in. It seemed stuck and again the line got wrapped around the spinning reel. It was soon a sprawling mess. 

This happened three times in all and I had to keep cutting the line free, wasting it. My boy reminded me of what I had said before, that patience was needed when fishing. But I was losing patience. It hadn’t been a great day when it came to practical skills, which is something I have always struggled with. That morning I had tried to drill holes for curtains in my son’s room in our new house. I had done it before in previous homes but with a hammer option on the electric drill. This was missing in the new, cheaper device I had bought and I ended up making a massive hole, no good for anything. 

I started murmuring complaints to God (although my incompetence wasn’t His fault!) and it was at that point I decided to go fishing with my boy, as I had promised him. But here I was again, a few hours later, facing another situation where I didn’t know what to do. The spinning reel just didn’t pull the line in. I fiddled with it, watching YouTube videos on my phone, and ignoring my boy’s wise advice: “Why don’t you just ask one of these fishermen?” “Because I’m too proud for that,” I admitted honestly but quietly, hoping the other men didn’t hear us. 

At last, I gave the bad news: “I’m sorry. It doesn’t work. We will have to go home.” My son sat on the bench and glared glumbly at the grey sea before us. The cold, damp air seemed to sneer at my best efforts. And I could feel the staring of the fishermen nearby, puffing on vapes and judging my lacklustre efforts. I felt thoroughly depressed. This boy deserved a dad who could do things! But I couldn’t drill a hole properly in his room, and now I couldn’t even fish with him. 

We both slumped on the nearby bench, unified in dejection and looking out at the surging waves. The silence said everything. Then I slowly packed up the rod and gear and put it into the bag, and instructed my boy to get ready to go home. 

But the look of sadness in his face angered me. Suddenly I felt a deeper threat looming over us. If I couldn’t work out the fishing rod, and we both went home – what did that teach my little boy? It would show him to give up easily. And that’s the last thing I wanted him to learn about life. 

“Come on then, let’s go,” he said quietly, clearly upset.

I stopped for a moment and my hands felt over the spinning reel, trying to unlock its secrets. WHY would the fishing line not haul itself in when I cranked the reel? There was some kind of clutch, gears… I guess, for what did I know?… and what was that tiny black knob underneath the contraption?

I hadn’t noticed that before. As the cold sea air floated around us, I began fiddling with the button, I think it’s called the anti reverse switch, and found it moved to the side. Then I heard an inner voice, that all-so-familiar beautiful quiet voice of God that I have got to know over the years: “Look at the thing that is in front of you.”

The answer to my problem didn’t lie on the horizon, or giving up or going home. I had been holding the secret to the needed breakthrough all along! The line had been somehow locked! And now I knew what to do. 

My boy looked startled as I rushed into action and quickly reassembled the rod I had just packed away. “Feed the line through again. Let’s try one last time,” I ordered. We tied the line to the feathered hook and weight, and I cast it deftly into the waters, testing it to see if the line could be reeled in by flicking the switch and using the bail arm. It did! This time I pulled the line back in and cast it out accurately, my memory of previous fishing excursions coming to the forefront of my mind as I remembered how to actually fish properly in some respect. 

We didn’t catch anything that day but my boy was whooping with delight, hugging me by the time we finished. We had been on a journey together, of trying and failing, and then being reminded by the Lord of seeing what was in front of us to succeed. As that old saying goes, “Sometimes we don’t need new landscapes, we need new eyes.”

This real-life story mirrors what the Lord has been saying to me recently about my general restlessness as a person. Sometimes it can be easy to fan into flame queer notions of an alternative life and the danger is missing the joy of immediacy; being fully in the present and living entirely in the moment before us now, not tomorrow. Noticing the thing that is in front of you – as Jesus said. “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”