The First Fish and the Long Wait

They were on the water at six and it is nearly ten and the stringer is empty and has been empty the entire time.

The boy is eight. This is his first proper morning of it, which his mother agreed to about three weeks ago and which he has asked about roughly forty times since. He has his own rod, which is not a good rod but is his. He has a tackle box with about nine things in it and four of them are unnecessary and the grandfather did not say so.

And they have caught nothing. Not a bite, not a nibble, not the suggestion of anything. Four hours on a pond that has fish in it, on a morning that should have been fine for it, and the two of them have sat there and produced nothing at all.

Around eight the boy got bored, which the grandfather had been braced for.

Around eight-thirty he stopped being bored, which the grandfather had not.

Because at some point in there the boy started talking. Not about anything. About a boy at school who is not really his friend but sort of is. About whether a dog can look at itself in a mirror and understand. About something that happened at his house that the grandfather is fairly sure the boy has not told anybody else and did not exactly mean to tell him either, and which came out sideways in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely.

And it is nearly ten now and the boy has gone quiet again, not unhappily, and is watching a line that is not going to do anything.

And the grandfather is sitting on a folding chair with a cold coffee understanding two things at once.

The first is that this empty morning is the best four hours he has spent with anybody in about a decade.

The second is worse and better. He is sixty-nine, and his own father took him fishing exactly twice, and both times they caught something, and he can remember the fish and cannot remember one single thing either of them said.

And you know that bank. You have wondered what you actually have to give a child, and you have assumed it is something you would have to be better than you are to give, and you have not considered that it might be time with nothing in it.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are already holding the thing you have to give, and you have been holding it since six this morning. Psalm 127:3 says children are an heritage of the LORD, and heritage is the language of something entrusted rather than something to be filled with content, and the Holy Spirit is on this bank with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

By the way

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy that people read as a command to be diligent, and the practical genius of it is in a phrase most readers go straight past.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:7

Four settings, and look at what they have in common. Sitting in the house. Walking along the road. Lying down. Getting up.

Not one of them is an occasion. There is no ceremony in that list, no lesson, no set-piece, no appointed hour. Every single one of the four is dead ordinary time, and two of them are literally the moments of falling asleep and waking up, which are the least ceremonial moments a human being has.

By the way is the phrase that carries it. It means: while you are going somewhere. In transit. In the gaps. And the whole verse is built on the assumption that the real transmission happens in unstructured hours rather than in arranged ones.

Which means four hours on a pond catching nothing is not a failed fishing trip that happened to contain a conversation. It is precisely the setting the instruction names, and the emptiness is not a defect in it, the emptiness is the mechanism.

You are standing in the appointed setting, and it looks like nothing because it is supposed to. The written word lists four ordinary unstructured moments and not one occasion, which means the morning that produced no fish was the morning that was working; and the Holy Spirit is the one at work in the gaps, on a bank, with an empty stringer and a cold coffee.

Why the boredom mattered

I want to name what happened around eight-thirty, because you are going to think of it as luck and it was not.

He got bored first. That is not a failure of the morning, it is the entrance to it. A bored child with nothing to look at and nobody else present and a long stretch of time in front of him will eventually start saying things, and what comes out is not the prepared material, it is what has actually been sitting in him.

That is why the thing about his house came out sideways in the middle of a sentence about a dog. It did not come out because you asked well. It came out because there had been three hours of nothing and no exit and no audience and an adult beside him who was not doing anything else.

You cannot manufacture that with a good question. You can only supply the three hours.

You were not lucky, and what you supplied was the only thing that produces it. Isaiah 40:11 says he shall gently lead those that are with young, and the word for gently there is about pace rather than about manner; His Spirit is the one setting that pace, and He is not timing your morning or counting your fish.

And there is a second half, and it belongs to a man of sixty-nine. You are sitting there doing arithmetic about your own father and two fishing trips and remembering the fish and not the words, and something in you is treating that as a debt to be paid or a wrong to be corrected. It is neither. Your father took you twice and you kept both of them for sixty years, which means he gave you more than you are currently crediting him with, and this morning is not a repair job on 1965.

You are not settling anything this morning, and this boy is not compensation for anybody. Psalm 103:17 says the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children, which puts the reach across generations on Him rather than on the man in the folding chair; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who put a boy on a bucket beside you at six in the morning.

What to do with the last hour

Here is the practical part, and it is smaller than everything above it.

The morning has produced something, and it is not going to produce anything else, and in about an hour you are going to pack up and drive him home and hand him back and it will be over.

Somewhere in that hour, say one sentence to him about who he is.

Not about the fishing, which produced nothing and does not need commentary. Not about how he did, because he did not do anything, which is the whole point. Not about the thing he told you about his house, which he did not fully mean to tell you and which you should hold carefully and probably not raise.

One sentence about who he is and whose he is. Eight seconds. Said to a boy on a bucket beside a pond with an empty stringer, in a morning designed for exactly this.

You have the hour and the setting and the standing, and none of the three had to be arranged. Scripture says talk of them by the way, which is a phrase about the gaps rather than the occasions; the Holy Spirit is the one who kept the fish away from two lines for four hours.

So the empty stringer is not a wasted morning. It is the setting the instruction names, and a boy who has said more in three hours than he has said to anybody in a month, and a grandfather with about an hour left and one sentence to say.

And a word for you rather than for them. If what you are carrying underneath this is heavier than a page can hold, find a real person this week and let them sit with it beside you. If the nights have gone darker than tired, tell somebody today; in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.