The Angler's Prayer
There's a bit of verse that you often find on trinkets (mugs, china plates, wall hangings etc) that goes: I pray that I may live to fish Until my dying day, And when it comes to that last cast I then most humbly pray: When in the Lord's great landing net And peacefully asleep, That in His mercy I be judged Good enough to keep. To be fair, it's not the best bit of poetry ever, but I can't help noticing that it also pretty much totally misses the point of the Christian gospel, too. Now, don't get me wrong, we will all at the end of our lives be judged ("it is appointed for man to die, and then the judgement" - Hebrews 9:27) but the poem seems to totally overlook the central Christian idea of grace. That we're not saved by what we do, but by what Jesus has done. My transference from God's landing net to his eternal keepnet will not be on the basis of the good things I've done, or on whether the good outweighs the bad, but will solely be on th