Wendell Barry is a farmer who Eugene Peterson calls the farmer pastor. He takes a small farm in Kentucky and submits himself to its care much the same as a Pastor submits himself to the care of a particular church. I feel that way about the Bays I fish. I’m there participating in what Gods doing. Nurturing, encouraging, surviving, participating, learning and trying to stay out of Gods way as he works his magic there. Not so much a leader as a participant. I wade in the waters trying to take what God gives and not do too much damage in the process.

As a pastor preacher my job is to preach and teach. My purpose is to help not interfere with what Gods doing in these people. This requires patience. Not just patience with people but with God. Like Wendell Barry the process is a long one. Decades are needed to be conformed to the image of Christ. I can’t beat the word into these people or drag Gods image out of them. No, I can only be with them, learn with them and be one of them in the process of becoming like Christ. It requires all of me. My time, thoughts, wife, children, loves, hates, joys, frustrations, possessions are all melted together and experienced as a gift from God. God wants all of them and all of me. This is what it means to be spiritual.

Fishing teaches me a great deal of what it means to be a Pastor and what it means to be spiritual. I am a part of these bays and it takes everything I have. All of my senses are tuned to what’s happening around me. Wind direction and speed, water clarity and temperature, barometric pressure, salinity level, tidal flow and direction plus my sense of hearing, smell, and previous experience combine to create something. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but it has taken years to get where I am and more years will be needed for me to be complete.

In the end I’m not making these bays into something anymore then I’m making the church where I minister into something. I am participating in the process. Hopefully I’m being molded into the image of Christ, which is a life long journey. Hopefully I will leave this church and these bays better then I found them and with a greater knowledge of there idiosyncrasy. I learn each cut, sand bar, reef and bog much the same way I learn the joys, pains, and lives of the people I minister to. I get in the water and wade around and it takes a long long time.