It's a waiting game

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Some forms of angling are more active than others. Lure or fly fishing involve constant casting, stalking carp or chub can involve lots of walking as well as creeping and crawling through undergrowth, and fishing for small fish can sometimes be a pretty frenetic activity, but on the whole fishing is a pastime that requires patience. Catching a 20 lb carp can require hours of sitting behind silent bite alarms and motionless bobbins, and fishing for specimen fish of any species tends to demand a lot of waiting.

But patience isn't necessarily passive, nor waiting lazy. Sure, if you want to pull your hat down over your eyes and drift off into a stupor you can, but it's not the best way to end up with a fish on the bank. Waiting can be active. Tying rigs and making up PVA bags, scanning the water for signs of fish moving, altering your shotting pattern, thinking up schemes and plans to outwit the fish.

Being a Christian involves quite a bit of waiting, too. After all, it's 2000 years since Jesus said He'd return and make all things new, and we're still waiting! We're currently waiting for things to get back to normal once the covid crisis is over- some of us are waiting for vaccinations, all of us are waiting for church life to resume in its familiar form, workplaces to re-open, fisheries that have chosen to close to open their gates again, family members to be allowed to travel to see each other again.

I guess at a time when we have no choice but to wait, the challenge is how do we wait? Just as a good angler uses the waiting time between bites to ponder and think about how to outwit their quarry and to reflect on what they're learning, perhaps we'd benefit from paying similar attention to our relationship with God: what's He teaching us through all of this? How are we growing in trust and faith? Just as the good angler might be tying rigs, mixing groundbait, making up PVA sticks, might we be praying or reading the Bible a bit more, adding some worship songs to our Spotify playlist, watching sermon videos?

None of us would have chosen this covid season, but let's try to learn through it and take hold of the opportunities it offers for us to grow in our relationship with the God who, even amid these trying times, is still with us and still faithful. 

After all, if anyone's equipped to be patient and to use waiting time well it's us - after all, we're anglers ... it's what we do!



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