Introduction to a Fisherman's Tales

       I worked a regular job from the time I was twenty-one until I was forty-six years old. It was blue-collar work and I put in lots of overtime.  I also like to think that I invested significant time in assisting my wife for all those years in raising our three children into the fine examples of the human race which they have turned out to be.  That was as it should have been. 

     Although I have enjoyed hunting, fishing and other outdoor activities for my entire life, the necessities of those times kept me from reflecting on these leisure pursuits with much more depth of thought than simply thanking God for the pleasant days that they added to my life.  Probably that was as it should have been as well.

     Today, at the age of fifty-eight, I have now been the preacher and pastor of the little Congregational church in the village of Lake Odessa Michigan for over twelve years.  A decade plus of full time reflection on life, scripture, faith, and the human condition, all to the end of getting something worthwhile about our relationships to God and one another into a coherent enough format that people will want to listen to it on a Sunday morning.  It’s still full-time work, but of a very different texture than what I did for a living in my blue-collar days. 

      My Grandpa Carr, an avid fisherman in the later years of his life on earth, was known to say that any story worth telling - is worth embellishing. While I don’t advocate out and out lying, all fishermen and fisherwomen will accept the necessity to embellish a fish story to make an impression.  That’s the whole reason that one tells a fish story in the first place.  There’s not much point in telling someone that you caught a half dozen six inch bluegills that afternoon.  You may have had more fun in doing it than you’ve had in a month of Sundays, but if it wasn’t a big mess of NINE inchers no one else wants to hear about it, regardless of the great time that you had!  People who love to fish all know this.

     Most of my fish stories are pretty factual.  Some of them are totally factual.  Others are, admittedly, a bit less so.  Even though all of my stories are based on the real people, places and events of my life, I am not against embellishing a story, or combining two good stories into one great story, if it gets the point I’m trying to make across better.

     So, if you were a participant in any of the adventures that I relate, or if you are in possession of irrefutable information that might contradict any part of one of my fish stories, please have the grace to know that as a ‘fisher of men’ I might have points to make with these stories that are more important than the difference between the eighteen inch brown trout that I caught and the twelve inch brown trout that you remember watching me catch.  

       Thank you. 

              M.J.