1.26.13

"Love suffers long..." or "Love is Patient.. " 1Corinthians 13,4

I have a friend from Las Vegas New Mexico and he used to fish the Gallinas River that runs through the canyon just north of town.

Now as a Yankee looking at its occasional ten feet width (we'd call it a brook), you'd think why bother.

But it was chock full of trout.

There were the newly dumped rainbow stockers who hung out  in the rare sunny pools the tourists fished (as if they weren't fully welcomed elsewhere). And then there were the native browns that hung out in the shadows on both sides of the "river."

There was two ways to fish here- you could slap some yellow glob on a hook and drop it in one of the sunny pools and watch the stockers stare at it until one of them finally made move.

Or you carouse the gnarly steep edges of the river, intensely crossing and searching the pools using a type of spinner.

You only got one chance to hook the browns and then they were on to you and you had to move on again.

He loved his Jesus. He loved his wife and family. And he loved fishing the Gallinas, stomping these banks his whole life, where he taught his four sons to fish in this same robust and skillful way.

There might have been days when it was too cold, or too little water, or occasionally too much, but I'm thinking he hooked more fish there than anyone has ever done.

I rememeber one day he bagged like thirty five browns and three stockers in about two and a half hours.  

I don't think I have ever seen anyone do anything any better than this.

But then again he loved it, and such love is patient.

And when it came to fishing the Gallinas, and loving his family, and his Jesus, he played the long game, and it showed.

And such a long game raised his human love up to the level of God's love where it belonged. 

http://www.zionpentecostmission.com/everyday-faith-everyday-use.html