Seeking the Invisible Fish
When I was younger and double-stuffed with pride, I was convinced I was super smart…I knew everything. By age ten, I had seen everything life has to offer. Now a creaky age 57, God has shown me that I have to look to fully appreciate all He has to offer. There is more. Much more. This short narrative I’ve known for quite some time. It illustrates how sin, brokenness and pride can make us… and made me… spiritually blind:
Once upon a time, a father took his daughter to a local pet shop. While wandering the fish aisle, the little girl saw a fish tank labeled “Invisible Fish, $3.” The father thought this a clever trick and kept moving down the aisle although the little girl lingered absolutely captivated at the “invisible fish” tank. She had to have one! The sales clerk noticed the girl’s enthusiasm and offered to bag one up for her. She responded, “Oh, yes!” At this point, the father was amused at how this was progressing…for a short time, anyhow. The sales clerk dipped a net into the “Invisible Fish” tank and scooped out for all purposes what looked like an empty net. Immediately thereafter, he put the “fish” into a plastic bag with water from the tank, tied off the top, and marked the plastic bag “$3.”
The little girl was absolutely delighted and the father was too…at least until the sales clerk ring up $3 on the register and put the plastic bag into brown paper bag for transport home. At this point, the father started getting annoyed that the sales clerk would carry this clever ruse this far and ultimately victimize the little girl who had no fish and the father who was out $3. The sales clerk simply shrugged and said, “What price for what we believe and see for ourselves?”
The father frowned during the entire car drive on the way home while the little girl giggled with glee in the back seat with her new pet “invisible fish.” Once home, the little girl found an old goldfish bowl in the basement, cleaned the dust out of it, filled it with water, and floated the “invisible fish” bag in the water. Some time thereafter, she released the “invisible fish” from the plastic bag into the goldfish bowl. The father sat across the room in a sofa chair, shaking his head, wondering how his daughter was going to manage in life with such an evolved imagination.
Later into the evening, the little girl’s parents tucked her into bed, closed the windows, and locked the house doors for the night. Before going to bed, the father went back downstairs to read his paper for a few minutes in the peace and quiet. Before sitting down in his easy chair, he paused for a moment, and while shaking his head in incredulous disbelief, he picked up the “invisible fish” bowl and held it up to the light by his chair.
Looking closely and taking his time, he looked intently inside the fish bowl…and there in the middle was… a small, clear-bodied fish. All this time he did not believe his daughter or the sales clerk…and there it was…. paddling in place in its little, globe-shaped, fish world. The father stood there in the semi-darkness of the living room, illuminated only by the lightbulb in a side table reading lamp, contemplating his presumption, close-mindedness, and inability to believe in his daughter’s invisible fish.
The following morning at the breakfast table, the father admitted to his daughter that he did not believe in the invisible fish but that now he did…. he saw it last night. The little girl said, “It’s o.k. Daddy, you just didn’t take time to look. Sometimes things are around us, but we don’t see them because we really aren’t looking. We have to believe before we even start looking.”
Certainly, God is not a fish, but without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him. Scripture teaches us to have faith and encourages us that “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen…” (Hebrews 11:1a)
Are we even willing to believe? Are we capable of “child-like faith?” When people think of “child-like faith,” they have in mind the sorts of things Jesus says in Matthew 18:3, Mark 10:14, and Luke 18:17, where He teaches that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to little children. However, in these passages Jesus isn’t talking about faith. In fact, He doesn’t mention faith at all. Instead, Jesus is talking about entering the Kingdom of Heaven, and He encourages His listeners to humble themselves like a child and receive Him like a child (Matt 18:4-5; Mark 10:14). In other words, there is something essential about the child-like perspective for the person who wants to see the Kingdom of Heaven.
Let’s dig deeper. What does Jesus mean, exactly? What is this child-like perspective that Jesus has in mind?
Creativity and imagination
Wonder and awe
Joyfulness and playfulness
Humor and forgiveness
Tenderness of conscience
Openness about emotions and feelings
Eternal hope and undying love
Willingness to learn and grow
Always thinking the best about life and other people
Exuberance and energy
Trust
These qualities that appear outwardly in children slowly gets stripped away from us (if we let it) as we grow older and encounter the brokenness and sin of this world.
Lack of faith and an unwillingness to believe can make us blind to things around us that really are there… things like invisible fish. JG