Fishing Blind

Something from the tackle box:

       As Jesus and his disciples were going into Bethsaida, some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch the man.  Jesus took him by the hand and led him out of the village, where he spit into the man’s eyes.  He placed his hands on the blind man and asked him if he could see anything.  The man looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees walking around.” 

       Once again Jesus placed his hands on the man’s eyes, and this time the man stared.  His eyes were healed, and he saw clearly. (Mark 8:22-25 CEV)

       Nothing on earth is more beautiful than the morning sun.  Even if you live to a ripe old age, you should try to enjoy each day, because darkness will come and will last a long time.  Nothing makes sense.  (Ecclesiastes 11:7-8 CEV)

Delmar and Thelma Carr

       My Grandpa Carr lived into his nineties and for all but the last couple of years of his life he was healthy enough to do a good many of the things that he had always loved to do.  He was ambulatory right through his eighties. He could get out and visit with friends and family, which he liked to do.  He could go out to eat with friends and family, which he loved to do.  And maybe most importantly, he could travel from his farm in southern Michigan to his cottage on Long Lake in northern Michigan where he would relax and fish.

       The only fly in this ointment of an otherwise happy retirement was the fact that for the last fifteen years or so of his life my Grandpa Carr was legally blind from an eye condition known as Macular Degeneration. 

       Macular Degeneration is a strange disease.  It’s not as if you are blind in a way that you can’t see anything at all, as if the world is as black as if you’ve closed your eyes and didn’t let any light get in.  There is light, and you can sort of see things, sometimes, if you don’t look right at them.  But the more you look right at something and try to focus on it the less well you can make it out.  I can remember my Grandpa sitting next to his television set, about two feet from it, and looking away from the screen at about a forty-five degree angle to a spot on the wall.  He couldn’t see a lot of what was going on in the show by doing this, but he could see a lot more than if he looked straight at the television set and tried to focus on what was happening. 

       I first noticed my Grandpa’s vision was slipping when he was driving in his seventies.  He always had a heavy foot on the gas pedal and was much more likely to pass than to be passed, but he got to where he wouldn’t see oncoming vehicles until they were way too close to be passing in front of.  I can remember one instance riding with him where he had pulled out to pass and Grandma and the rest of us had to shout for him to pull back into his own lane so that he wouldn’t get us all killed in a head-on collision.  That was about the last straw.  My Grandpa liked to drive but he also liked to live, so Grandma and his two daughters did all the driving for him over the last decade plus of his life. 

       There are some genetic predisposition factors associated with Macular Degeneration and my Mother, who is now in her eighties, is afflicted with the same disease.  It’s such an odd disorder that it can almost seem comical if it wasn’t so awful.  The last time I was up at the cottage visiting Mom and Dad we went into Cheboygan for lunch, which they do almost every day.  As we are driving through town my mom comments about the man smoking on the sidewalk.  My Dad asks how she can tell he’s smoking.  She says she can see the smoke cloud around his head.  I look over and sure enough, there’s a man with a cigarette blowing billowing puffs of smoke into the air.  We pull up behind a pickup truck at a stoplight and Mom reads one of its bumper stickers without missing a word.  But then, when I ask her what’s written on the giant billboard half a block away – she can’t even make out where the billboard is at, let alone make out any of the three foot tall letters that are on it. 

       When we’re walking into the diner Dad has to take her elbow and lead her right up to the curb, which is painted a bright yellow, and tell her when to step up because she just can’t see where it is.  She’s given up knitting, which she loved to do, because she can’t see well enough to knit any more, but she still plays bridge at least twice a week as she can apparently still see the cards.  Go figure. 

       A couple of weeks ago she was quite sure that a pot of flowers sitting on a tree stump was a man wadding in the water down by our boat dock.  It will continue to get worse.  Macular Degeneration never improves.   Even when one is taking medications for the disease it only gets worse at a slower pace.  I get my eyes examined twice a year and thankfully I’m showing no signs of developing Macular Degeneration as of yet.  But then, I’m only fifty-eight. 

       Anyway, back to my Grandpa and his late years up at the lake house.  As I’ve told you in my previous story, my Grandpa Carr was a bluegill and perch fisherman, an old school cane pole man, who only used worms on plain hooks as bait.  Which – you would think – would be the perfect set-up for poor old blind Grand-pap.  Just set up a lawn chair on the dock after lunch and let the old-timer fiddle around with the guppies that hang out around there until it’s time to bring him in for his afternoon nap.

I still use Grandpa's boat and motor

       Yeah, - right!  My Grandpa Carr wouldn’t be having anything to do with that sort of a deal.  He may have been a cane-pole fisherman, but he liked to fish with that cane-pole out of a boat.  And he would be taking that boat of his to any of the spots around that four hundred acre lake where he knew he might get into some pan fish that were worth cleaning for dinner.  - ‘Nuff said! 

One of his favorite spots was off that point

       Of course, - he’s legally blind.  Now, Grandpa might be willing to let Grandma do the car driving, but he’s not letting her chauffeur him around the lake in his fishing boat.  She wouldn’t have done it anyway.  She liked to sit in the cottage and enjoy some peace and quiet while Grandpa was out fishing (their seventy plus year marriage could accurately be described as ‘cantankerously argumentative’ most of the time).  No, - Grandpa would be skippering his fourteen-foot boat and Mercury outboard engine - sans crew, - and that was that. 

       But the man was blind! He should not be out tearing around a big lake in a motorboat, even if it was just a big rowboat with a twenty-five horsepower outboard engine, - and he knew that.  That’s why he had a system. 

       He would usually go out in the early morning, before the kids on the jet-skis and water skis were even awake, let alone churning up the waters on the lake.  First he would listen for any other boat traffic.  If he heard any at all he would take note and not go in that direction. 

       Once he decided where he was going for the morning, he would putter out at a slow idle only, trolling speed, not much faster than you could have rowed that boat.  He would follow the shoreline even if he were going to a spot directly across the narrowest part of the lake.  It might take a longer time to get where he was going but that was OK. 

       He knew where the landmarks were that he could see, the tall blue house with white trim, the bright yellow pontoon boat, the dock with the flag, the big dead birch tree that leaned way out over the water, only when he got to the landmark he was looking for would he turn and head out into the deeper water where he would anchor, and then he would stay there, not moving until he was done fishing.  Once he was anchored and stationary he didn’t care about the other boats coming out onto the lake.  He was fishing and it was their responsibility to look out for him now.  

       He gave up using bobbers with his cane-pole.  You had to look at a bobber to see what it was doing, and if he looked at it that’s when he couldn’t see it.  So he became an expert in the art of fishing by feel, jigging his hook and line straight down, deep into the water, right next to the boat, and waiting for the tap, tap, tap, - and then the tug – that let him know it was time to set his hook on that big deep swimming perch or sunfish.  He got really good at it, too.  He caught a lot of fish that way.

       Grandpa didn’t really need to see well to take a fish off the hook and toss it in his basket, or to put a new worm back on the hook, he could have done that with his eyes closed anyway, - and maybe he did, just for fun.  With the cane pole he didn’t need to worry about reels with cranks, or lots of line coming off a spool to get all tangled up.  Just lower the baited hook and line straight down, and then pull the fish straight up.

       When he was done fishing he would head directly back towards the shore, which he could make out, until he came to that landmark he had used to find his spot in the first place.  Then he would turn and follow the shoreline back in the opposite direction at a slow idle to his cottage, the yellow house with the big picture window, brown shutters and gray chimney, where he would tie up at the dock and unload his catch for the day. 

       Grandpa would still clean the fish by hand even though he couldn’t see what he was doing.  That was his job.  He scaled, gutted, took the heads off, and washed them up, - and then grandma cooked them, - that was the deal all their lives.  I do have to admit that in those late years, if you were watching, you might catch grandma doing a little clean up work on grandpa’s cleaning job at the kitchen sink before the fish were dusted and fried.  She never did say anything about it to anyone though.  Grandma did love and appreciate her blind fisherman, as adversarial as their relationship could otherwise sound on most topics of discussion.  All in all, it was a good system. 

Something to take home in your creel:

     

       I don’t know why Jesus didn’t completely heal the blind man at Bethsaida on the first go-around when his spit into his eyes.   The poor old fellow had to get a double dose of Jesus’ touch to be restored to complete sight, and as far as I can tell this is the only miraculous healing Jesus ever did that went down like this.  I don’t know why.  Even as a preacher I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess.  It’s just the way it happened as far as I can tell.

       Now there are plenty of sermons and bible study lessons you can read on this story, all of them trying to make good points about the two phased healing process for this particular recipient of God’s grace.  Most of those points seem to have way more to do with defending Christ’s divine omnipotence to do just exactly what he wants to do, whenever he wants to do it, than they do with any life lessons we might be able to get out of the story.  Which fact frustrates me. 

       The arguing points sort of go along these lines.

        “Since the Lord Jesus healed the blind man half way on the first try, and then all the way on the second try, he must of meant to have it happen that way, because he’s the LORD!”

       “Fine, granting that Jesus is Lord, what purpose did he have in doing a halfway first and then all the way?”

       “Obviously to teach the man some lesson!”

       “Well, OK, then what was that lesson?” 

       “The bible doesn’t tell us what the lesson was, so it’s not important that we know.  The important thing is that you believe that Jesus meant to heal him in two stages, because we know that he could have done it in one go if he had meant to do it that way!  He’s the Lord Almighty, and don’t you forget it!”

       “Fine!  Then I’m leaving it alone!” 

       I do not know what lesson Jesus was trying to teach the blind man in Bethsaida, IF that’s what he was trying to do, which I kind of doubt.  I can speculate, as some have done, but without at least some hint that I don’t have that’s all I would be doing. 

       But even though I don’t know what Jesus might have meant by healing this man in two stages, instead of one, I can make an observation about it and note a truth it reveals: 

       It is possible to be abundantly blessed by God, even to the point of being miraculously healed of some affliction by his loving touch, and still not have everything about your life be the way that you wish it was. 

       The kingdom of heaven is real, - and it is near, - it is close at hand, - it might even be here right now within you, praise the Lord.  But, for the time being, while it’s close at hand and even within you, it is only so mixed in with the fallen world as we otherwise live in it.  The wheat is there, but for now it’s there amid the tares. 

       Almost everyone who has lived past the age of thirty or so knows that things don’t just keep getting better and better the longer you go on in life, at least not physically, it just doesn’t work that way.  No matter how hard you work to keep it from happening, something is going to eventually break down and give out.  As the old comedian, Redd Foxx, used to say; “Health nuts are all going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.”

       My grandpa Carr didn’t die of nothing.  His heart, which had always been somewhat suspect, finally gave up on him at the age of almost ninety-two.  But as I’ve said, apart from the last couple of years, he stayed pretty active even though he was blind. 

       Lot’s of folks lose their sight, or their hearing, or lose a limb, or have to use a wheel chair, or on and on with any number of misfortunes that can develop, or befall, or even plague us from the day of our birth.  Some folks don’t do anything after that sort of mishap occurs.  Some folks do some, but not as much as they could do.  And some folks go on and do just as much as they possibly can do even when wisdom might tell them they probably shouldn’t, like taking a motor-boat out fishing on a busy lake by yourself when you’re legally blind.

       I’m not sure what the proper balance is.  I guess it probably depends on whom you ask.  All I’m sure of is that if I ever develop Macular Degeneration, which may very well happen, I want to keep fishing like my grandpa Carr did, - fishing by feel alone if that’s all I have left to me, – and know that I’m blessed by God in my being able to do it.  -  I also hope that I have someone else around who’s willing to drive the boat for me.