Sockeye Fishing Lessons

Her smile stretched as large as the sockeye salmon she caught – big, broad, and beautiful. As I scooped my daughter’s fish out of the water for her to see, I thought the tightening net would snap because of the fish’s weight. After years of fishing for trout in the rivers and lakes around Montana, fishing for much, much larger salmon in Alaska was, literally and figuratively, an entirely different animal.

Our friend Aaron gave our family all the same instructions before we started plying the waters. Turns out you don’t trick salmon into biting a hook or a fly. You don’t delicately present your fly in a natural way, hoping not to spook the fish. You don’t select the right pattern or color to dupe them.

Instead, you chuck this mass of metal upstream, where it splashes in like a cannonball. The weights and hook bounce and drag on the bottom, until the river pushes it just past you. Then you heave the hook horizontally out of the water with a sidearm motion . . . and hope the hook happens to snag an unsuspecting fish in the mouth.

As rough and tumble as it sounds, there is a technique to it, which Aaron explained and demonstrated to all of us many times over the course of two days. When my wife and I were lucky enough to snag a fish, however, his instruction evaporated from our minds, and we reverted back to what we knew – trying to land a trout. The result: lots of Aaron’s tackle lost, and no fish.

But my daughter’s brain, and the brain of most kids, was like a chalkboard. Her little mental eraser wiped away the instructions about catching trout once Aaron started explaining how to catch salmon, and new instructions appeared. She approached salmon fishing like the child she was – innocent and unencumbered by any preconceived notions or I-know-what-I’m-doing pride, unlike us adults.

So when Jesus said we need to receive the kingdom of heaven like a little child (Luke 18:17), He meant we need to wipe away all the clutter of what we think heaven should be like, and what we think we should be doing to serve Him. We just need to accept His personal instruction for us, act on it, and be patient.

Otherwise, we’ll end up thwarted, frustrated and angry, which is not a good combination for getting into heaven, and apparently doesn’t work for catching sockeyes either.