Sky Fishing

In a novel by the penetrating Christian author and Pulitzer Prize Runner-up, Frederick Buechner, a character is flying a kite. When asked what he was doing, he responded that he was fishing in the sky. The person pressed the issue by asking what he was fishing for. And the reply was that he supposed he was fishing for God.

Keeping relationship with the living Creator of the Universe can be an inconsistent enterprise at best. You go out some days and the effort is exciting as the wind pulls the lines taut and takes us for a thrilling ride. Other days, you stand in the still field, your kite grounded by the constant press of gravity. You can run as fast as you can, feet pounding the turf, trying hard to generate lift by your own steam. And the kite mimics signs of flight from the effort. But the moment you stop, flutters uselessly to the ground. And still other days, the pouring rain keeps you from going outside at all.

And my guess is that if we’re really honest about it, there are probably more windless and rainy days than days soaring in the sun that we long for. Days like today when the innocence of a quiet town is shattered by the swings of a brutal crime. Days when the pillar of a community or church suddenly falls to the ground, never to rise again. Days when children, who have no business dying, die anyway. And we’re left, holding our kite, wondering and waiting for something to lift us up; trying as hard as we can to make it fly or waiting for a breath of wind to remind that there actually were days of wind.

In both Greek and Hebrew (the original languages of the Bible), the word for spirit (pneuma and ru-ach) is literally defined “wind.” And it occurs to me that the truer faith is not one that has God or the Bible or life or pain or politics figured out (all of them impossibilities), but the one that stands patiently and faithfully in the field, waiting through the uncertainty and doubt for the wind, certain of only one thing: that one day, the wind will blow.

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” ~Romans 8:26