Casting Our Net

In the early 1990s, I served a United Methodist church on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was a fairly new congregation, and unlike every other church I had served, it was full of people who had never been Methodists, and a strong minority of people who had not grown up in church. It was different, looking back, in a very good way!  One member was a school teacher, who in her spare time went floundering and cast netting. (Both are fishing activities.)  The floundering I picked up pretty quickly. “Know where your feet are” was a valuable rule! But the cast net; I guess I lacked the patience, manual dexterity, or experience to really make it work. It seemed effortless for her, as if her body and arms were one with the net. The main rules for cast netting seemed to be: 1) Don worry too much about the catch (“Fish are fickle”, she said), and 2)Practice a lot—alone—until it becomes natural, a part of who you are.

What if this were our approach to fishing for people?