Growing up, I remember preachers.  I really can’t think of very many of them by name.  What I do remember is that I never thought of them as working really.  Except of course on Sunday, but they seemed to enjoy that so much, it was hard to consider that as work.  I guess maybe that’s why God has allowed me to preach.  Now I know that Sundays aren’t the only day that preachers work, though I believe that it is probably the most enjoyable of days.  I’ve also learned that doing God’s will for a living isn’t always enjoyable.  Sometimes I think that the enjoyment of Sunday might be the reward for all of the heartache of the rest of the week.  Not just for preachers but for all of God’s children.

I just worked a Tuesday that felt like a whole week.  I guess we’ve all done that at one time or another.  Just so nobody tries to put my lousy Tuesday together with a particular event, this article won’t be published until several weeks after the fact.  Anyway, I felt that I needed some time alone with God, so I grabbed my pole and went to meet him at the seashore.  I caught three fish and released them all.   It’s not that I’m such a conservationist, but if you saw what I caught, you wouldn’t want to eat them either. I thanked God each time I caught one of these creatures.  I marveled that he would have made anything so ugly, and prayed that no real damage had been done by my hooking and reeling them in.  Somehow I sensed that even these ugly creatures were precious to God.  It might sound silly, but it was as though He was letting me play with them for a while because I needed the diversion.  He was letting me play with them, because as precious and wonderful as these beings of His were, I was even more precious.   And not just me but this holds true for all of you as well.

I was fishing from a rock jetty.  The waves were crashing on the rocks often misting me with the salt spray.  One time they just plain got me soaked.  I kept thinking of freak waves that sweep fishermen off of rocks, never to be seen again.  And I thought of that statement that God makes to Job.  “Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?  When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it, And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?”  (Job 38: 8-11)  If you ever want a good perspective on the power of God compared to the power of man, just stand on a rock jetty at high tide when the surf’s up.