Trying Something New...

Yeah… this is going to be about fishing… but trust me, it’s a metaphor for something else…

So, I woke up yesterday, and I decided that on Friday, I am going to go fish for bass.  It might be too cold for them to be biting during this time of the year as temperatures dipped below 40s and 50s during the night and some days barely got over 60.  Little less sunlight than in the summer, so water temps probably have dipped.  And I am going fishing at Canoe Creek State Park… I know its drained… I just realized I might be wasting my Friday.

But anyways, I decided to try something new.  For the last 20 years of my life, since I really got into fishing, I have always used one kind of knot to tie by braided mainline fishing line to my fluorocarbon leader fishing line.  It is the uni-knot.  I have great confidence in this knot, but I want to learn a new knot.  Apparently, the strongest knot to tie to connect two types of fishing line together.  It is the FG Knot.  So I spent yesterday, while Ben was napping, to give this knot a try.  I learned, it’s not easy to tie this knot with confidence.  I had to try and try again and again, wasting fishing line over and over again.  In my final product, I have no idea if I did it correctly.  If I tie a bad knot, and hook up with a fish, it will snap my line, and I lose the fish, not to mention the fish will have a hook and 7 feet of fishing line attached to its mouth. 

So, why change?  Why try something that I have zero confidence in (yet)?  Just use the knot I have used for the last 20 or so years?  Well, its because I want to try something new, something different.  I want to learn something new and be good at it.  But the only way I will learn something new is to give it a try, face failure, face frustration, and be filled with agony.  But I know if I practice tying this new fishing knot, I will have confidence.  And also, I believe that it is always worth while to try something new, it is imperative to learn something new at any age and any circumstance.  Because there just might be a time that you will come to a situation that may require a new skill.

I think that is what makes faith difficult.  Faith is about learning, constantly learning.  You cannot have the same faith you had when you first became a Christian.  You cannot have the same kind of faith you had when you were a child.  Faith needs growth in order to flourish and to find confidence and peace of mind.  I think people who struggle with their faith is partly because we held onto faith that we learned when we are younger, you get baptized, and you feel like, what is done is done.  But faith is a growing experience, and as we get older or life situations get more complex.  As we grow from a child to adulthood, we are faced with more stressful situations.  And if we have not grown in our faith, life can become rather difficult and confusing.  Faith is about building confidence and it is about continual learning. 

Stay close to the word of God in the Bible, it is your map to life.  And sometimes, reading a story we may be familiar with as a child, may have new meaning to us as an adult.  Because now God is speaking to you differently, because you are no longer a child.  Be diligent in prayer and meditation, prayer isn’t always about you talking to God, but sometimes it is about you being silent and hearing God.  In that silence, maybe God will bring images to your mind, and it confronts you with a new meaning of life and faith.  And finally, faith is about listening and responding to the world that is around us.  Faith is active and it is moving.  It is about being able to be in a challenging space, whether that space be a new thought, or conflicting ideology, or environment.  It’s about how we make sense of a world that is changing around us and being able to respond to it with the compassion, attitude, and maturity found in the example of Christ.  Keep moving, keep growing, keep learning, keep challenging so that you can find confidence in your faith. 

If you feel like nothing in your life seems to be making sense and that you find yourself on the losing side of the battles you face.  Make a change, try something different, something new.  If the old way of life that you thought was comfortable living not working anymore, maybe your soul is telling you to change, do something else.  No use in beating a dead horse.  Find something useful, something meaningful when the old way isn’t working.  Your soul with thank you.