Me and my family love to fish at the beach. Every year in October we drive down there with our fishin poles, buy some shrimp, and fish all night off the pier. Its really a good time even if we don’t catch nothin cause we get to spend hours talkin and sippin on hot chocolate all night in the cool ocean air.

This past weekend that’s exactly what we did. Me, my wife, my momma, and my deddy drove down to the beach Friday night. Got on the pier around 7pm and fished till after midnight. Unfortunately we didn’t catch much, but God taught me an important lesson that I want to share with y’all.

See, when yer fishin at the beach you catch all kinds of fish. But there’s really only a few types that ya want to eat. Mullets and Spots are the best, but there's other species that you want to steer clear of like pinfish and blues. Pinfish got so many bones in em that you’d be takin yer life in your own hands if you tried to eat em, and blues just got a real unpleasant taste to em.

Well, Friday night we wont catchin nothin but Blue’s. Now they was purty big and fun to reel in but it was sad when we finally got em and realized that we couldn’t throw it in the cooler. Every time me or my deddy would hook one, momma and Kathy would start clappin and cheerin. “Reel em boys! Get us enough for a fish fry!” and then they'd look all disappointed when they realized we’d have to throw it back.

As we was repeatin this over and over, I started getting upset. I prayed, “Jesus, please let us catch something worth keeping.”  But we just kept catchin them same old nasty tastin fish again and again. I was so mad I could pass gas and kick at it. He just won’t answerin my prayer. Then suddenly  two things happened, almost simultaneously, that made me realize God had sometin more important he wanted to teach me.

First, Momma tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “Don’t look behind ya but there's a strange lookin man back there, he looks kinda dangerous”  I turned around and saw the most scraggly lookin fella I’d ever seen. He was real skinny, wearin all camouflage, and looked like he hadn’t shaved in years. I whispered back to my family, “Ya’ll don’t make eye contact with him or he might come over here and kill us"  Well, instead he just put his head down and walked away without sayin a word.

Second, about that same time my deddy reeled in another Blue fish. Just before he threw him back an old man yelled from the other side of the pier, “Hey if you don’t want to keep that thang, give him to me cause they make good cut bait”  My deddy handed the fish to the old man, and the old man proceeded to cut the fish up into little pieces and use it as bait. “Thanks, this is good for catchin king mackerel” he said.

Immediately God spoke to my heart,  “BillyRay, all of that just happened so I could teach you a lesson.  You see you treated that scraggly man just like you've been treating those fish… like he was good for nothing. You waisted an opportunity to witness to him.”

Then He brought these verses to my mind.