One of my favorite hobbies is fishing. I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid. I can spend all day fishing, I don’t care if it’s hot, cold, or rainy. I don’t even care if I catch anything. Call me crazy, but I love the challenge of outsmarting something with a brain the size of a pea. A few months ago, right after school let out, we packed up the family and headed for a short vacation to place that just so happens to be at one of my favorite fishing spots. Day 2 I was using a lure that has been pretty productive on that lake, and I was hooking up 1 and 2-pound largemouth bass pretty consistently. So it’s about dinnertime, and my wife and girls are ready to call it a day, so I say, “Okay, don’t wait on me, I have to gather all my stuff” which they know by now is code for “dad just wants to get in a few more casts.” So they head up and I’m standing on the dock and about five or six casts later I get a strike. And I realize pretty quickly that this isn’t a 1-2-pound bass, but something way different. And bigger.
At first I thought it was a pike, but I quickly realized this wasn’t fighting like a pike. It was pulling hard, going back and forth, and heading for shallow water, trying to get under the dock. Now normally when you get a fish close and it’s fighting you can see the side of it and you can get an idea what’s on the other end of the line, but not this time. All I saw was my line going out into the clear water, zigzagging back and forth attached to something dark and mud-colored. Eventually I got it close to the dock and I see it: it’s a bowfin, probably about 2 feet long and 7-8 pounds, and I have it hooked up on a medium bass rig. So I get it up to the surface of the water, and normally I just reach down and grab the fish by its lower lip and haul it out, right? Well I look down and all I see are teeth and I think, “There is no way I’m sticking my finger in that mouth.” I have no net. There’s a boat on one side of the dock and a jet ski on the other, so I can’t walk it down the dock to the beach. So I think, “Well, I’ve got 65lb-test braided line and a 12lb leader… I’ll just grab the line and haul it out and hope I tied the knots well enough.” So with one hand on the rod I reach out and grab the line and pull. About halfway out of the water the fish gives this big shake and SPLASH he’s back in the water and I’m standing there wondering what the heck just happened. I look down and the line didn’t break. The knots held. Then I see the hook on the lure… and the hook is broken. Now, fish always flip around when you first get them out of the water, and those first flips are always the strongest until it tires out, but I’ve never had one break a hook in the 45 or so years that I’ve been fishing. Usually they’ll flip around for a little bit, then calm down enough that I can take the hook out and get a photo before I put them back in the water before they die and become turtle food. And since I’m a catch-and-release fisherman I try to get my catch back in the water as soon as possible, but I at least want a picture, otherwise it’s just a fish story like this one, right?
Now, sure, sometimes I’ll unhook a fish and it’ll slip out of my hands before I can get a photo and it’ll flop around and flip itself back into the water. And sometimes if I’m using big juicy worms on a hook, it’ll swallow the hook so deep that I have to cut the line so that I can get it back in the water quickly; sure, it’s a little uncomfortable for the fish until its stomach acids dissolve the hook, but at least it’s alive. It’s back in the water where it needs to be in order to live.
When we are baptized, our souls are placed in the life-giving water of sanctifying grace, and that’s where they need to be in order to live. Now there’s a fisher of souls that is not a catch-and-release fisherman. What he catches, he doesn’t want to put back into the water of sanctifying grace. The fisher of souls wants to keep everything he catches, and hang them all in his trophy case. (Or maybe fry them up and serve them with fries and coleslaw.) Make no mistake: he’s an expert fisher of souls. He knows when to appeal to our sense appetites and offer us a big juicy worm on a hook. He knows when that doesn’t work to try a lure that makes us bite out of anger, or out of fear, or out of simple curiosity.
Of course the best thing to do is to not get hooked in the first place. We need to ignore whatever he throws in front of our nose. If we do get hooked, we need to fight, to try and shake the hook, break the line, or break the hook if necessary. If he gets us, well, we can’t stay a soul out of water for too long. The longer we stay out of the waters of sanctifying grace, the more likely our souls will wind up in the trophy case of the fisher of souls. But we, unlike the fish, have the power to remove the hook from our own lip, or pull it out from our own gut. That power is called free will, and we can use that power to walk into the confessional, and flip ourselves right back into the waters of sanctifying grace. Right now, this moment, ask yourself: Are you a soul out of water?