John Fischer The Catch

I’ll always remember Chandler’s first fish. He was barely Kindergarten age and we had ended up with an empty campsite all to ourselves — an all-around great experience that included catching his first fish. It was a nice fat rainbow trout that would have cooked up beautifully had we kept it.

Now the whole time leading up to this moment, he had talked of nothing but bringing a couple fish home for dinner, and yet the one thing Chandler hadn’t counted on was the fact that eating a fish means it has to die first. There was no way he could have been prepared for the reality of seeing a fish flop around gasping for water. I even had it on ice for a moment when Chandler announced he didn’t want to take it home; he wanted to put it back in the water. So I quickly threw it back in, and for a moment it floated upside down, and then flipped itself over and swam away.

I remember reflecting on how somewhere in that river there was a very lucky rainbow trout that has seen the inside of an ice chest and lived to tell about it.

When Jesus told Peter he was going to fish for men instead of fish, His disciples were used to a different style of fishing. They primarily used nets to capture a number of fish and gather them in. Baiting a fish, deceiving it, hooking it, reeling it in, grasping it in your hands, pulling out the hook and throwing it in an ice chest were not a part of a fish’s reality at the time.

I wonder how many people out there have been hooked by a Christian, reeled in, put on ice, and still managed to escape and are swimming around in the world with a bad experience to tell about. We need to be sensitive to those who may have been the target of someone’s witnessing campaign that did not come with the gentleness, love and respect that should underlie any missionary effort. Part of our mission among those who are not Christians may include undoing mistakes that have gone before.

Remember, Jesus was talking about gathering in a “catch.” To do so, you throw your net in the water, hope and pray for fish, and pull it up. It’s really up to God to put the fish there, as He did for Peter before Peter even met Him. We throw out the truth and gather in those who respond. There may be one or none. There may be more than we can haul in. No hooks, lines or sinkers. Just the truth.

I sat next to a Jewish woman once at a public school function and when she found out I was a Christian, she had a question all ready for me.

“Maybe you can explain this,” she said. “A young man came to my door recently. He was a college student painting houses. My house needed painting so I took his card. When I asked him about the fish symbol I noticed on the card, he smiled and said, ‘Oh, I’m a Christian painter!’ Now what do you suppose he meant by that?”

I laughed and told her I really didn’t know except that he was a Christian who was trying to make some money painting houses.

When it comes to our place in the world, it’s much better to be a Christian than to be a Christian something-or-other. In other words, stay away from using “Christian” as an adjective. No one knows what a Christian painter is anyway. Even Christians don’t know; we just think we do because we use these terms all the time.

I asked the woman how she responded to his comment about being a Christian painter and she said, “Oh, I just asked him if he could paint!”

I like this woman. It’s really simple isn’t it? It makes no difference to her if he was a Christian painter or a Muslim painter or a Buddhist painter…she only wanted to know if he could paint her house. There’s a lesson here.

When it comes to our work in the world, our work comes first. The young painter, as well-meaning and as passionate about Christ as I’m sure he was, got his witness too far out in front of him. His witness is to do a good job as a Christian. How we do our job is not a means to a witness, it is our witness.

In the marketplace no one cares if you are a Christian. They just want to know: Can you paint? Can you compute? Can you run a company? Can you market this product? Can you manage this store? Can you operate this cash register and smile at all my customers? Once you prove yourself as having integrity and value to your employer, then the fact that you are a Christian will mean something.

People have so many religious preconceptions today. To announce your allegiance up front means you will have to fight through all those preconceptions just to be heard; and even then, the stereotype is hard to shake. If you establish credibility on other levels first, you can clear the deck of all that other stuff. Then you might have a better chance of getting someone to consider what it really means to be a Christian.

In the end, what you claim to be is nothing compared to who you are.