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Hot and humid days are oftentimes difficult to bear. Last week’s hot spell finally came to a relief in the weekend. By taking advantage of the cooler weather, I went to a local lake to relax a little bit – bass fishing. A little girl came to me in the middle of my casting. “Can you help me?” she pleaded. I turned around and looked at her, wondering why she came to a stranger like me, alone. Then I saw her hand was holding a fishing pole, a big blob of tangled fishing line with a float and a hook spawn over the fishing reel. I admire her courage in thinking that I wouldn’t reject her. I told her that it is not worth time to untangle the line now but I will help her to reattach the line to the float and the hook. Five minutes later, I cut off the tangled portion and used fresh line from the reel to reattach everything back.  She was happy to go back to her parents and fish again.

In the past two years, I started to pick up the hobby of fishing. I spent time in local creeks, ponds and lakes to enjoy my relaxing time, with my wife’s permission, of course. 🙂 As I recall, there are various situations could make my fishing trip disappointing or sometimes struggling – for example, bad weather, poor water condition, incorrect fishing gear, baits and lures, or, too many people at the same spot, fish is not in the mood of biting, etc. The most frustrating experience, however, is to untangle fishing line. I still remember in the early stage of my learning to fish, I could spend half of my time to straighten out tangled lines. Coupled with my novice experience and low cost fishing gear, the fishing reel and line just didn’t work together well at all – I couldn’t cast it far and they always tangle after my casting. I was struggling most times to find a lead in order to untangle the line.

When I think of the fishing experience that I had, I was wondering if there are lessons for me to learn. I would say, sometimes our life is similar to fishing. In our journey of life, we may set many goals or objectives, ambitiously. Then we cast our lines out hoping that our effort would be rewarded by achieving what we want. When environment and conditions were not in our favor, we ran into difficulties – tangled lines. At that time, we are struggling to untangle the lines – to overcome the difficulties. The question is what is our approach? Are we basing on our own wisdom and methods to solve the difficulties or do we rely on our Lord’s wisdom? The difference could be 40 years vs. a month – if we look at Israelites’ experience. Instead of travelling from Egypt to the land of Canaan in a month, they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. This is when they used their own understanding instead of following God’s instructions.

In recent daily Bible reading, we read the story of Naaman’s Leprosy healed by prophet Elisha (2 Kings chapter 5). Again, we saw how our understanding and wisdom are so limited in facing difficulties. The initial scoffing from Naaman against Elisha’s instruction of “go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored to you and you shall be clean. (2 Kings 5:10)” is a good example. I was always wondering if Naaman rejected the idea of dipping in the Jordan river, what is the end result of him? I think he is going to suffer from the disease undoubtedly. Isn’t this the same situation we ran into frequently – we rely on our own understanding in solving situations and we struggled! This reminds me of my favorite verse from the book of Proverbs chapter 3:5 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding你要專心仰賴耶和華，不可倚靠自己的聰明” If in all our ways we submit to Him, He promised that He will make our paths straight (Proverbs 3:6).

For sure, there are always tangled line situations in this world, as Jesus indicated to us in the gospel John 16:33. We just have to remember that our Lord has overcome the world and there is no any trouble that our Lord couldn’t handle.