What a Love

With the approach of the long weekend in the month of May, as a child, I anticipated very much the opening of fishing season. We lived on the south side of a very large lake. The pickerel spawned every May on that side of the lake. Fishing was excellent for about a month after the opening of the season. Virtually every late afternoon during those years found me observing the wind and the weather on the lake as I returned home from school. My very small nine foot punt, which I had purchased used for ten dollars, when I was about eight years of age, was only good for calm evenings. My father and I would row out a few hundred yards and then begin moving down the shoreline. It was considered normal to catch your legal limit of six good sized pickerel each before the sun went down completely. I can still taste the battered fish my mother fried on some special evenings, usually weekend evenings, after ten o’clock at night.

There were some evenings when large waves rolled into shore. On those nights my father would sometimes take me in the car down the lake shore to a protuberance of rocky land known as Cherry’s Point. There we would join many other fishermen and women casting our lines from shore. Many lures were lost on the rocks during these evenings. This was a minor inconvenience, because I would return in the summer and dive from my boat to retrieve many of those same lures for the next fishing season. One particular evening remains forever imprinted on my memory. I had hooked the largest Northern Pike that I have ever seen up close on the end of a fishing line. Both my father and I were very excited as we worked to land this fish that must have weighed in at over fifteen pounds. The inevitable happened. As the fish approached the rocky shore line, it used its considerable size and strength to snap the fishing line at the last possible moment. My father was just reaching out to drag in my prize. What I remember so vividly about that evening was not my disappointment at losing the fish, but how visibly upset my father was for MY loss. He didn’t care about the loss of the fish, but he did care so very much that I would be upset by the loss. What I remember is a raw example of a father’s love in action. Like all good fathers he wanted to protect me and virtually guarantee success and no disappointments in life. It is impossible to attain such heights for human fathers. It is most certainly possible for our heavenly Father. We read of this most powerful love in 1John 3: 1-2.

1 ¶ Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.

2 Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

What an incredible love we enjoy in becoming the sons and daughters of God. God loves us so much that he has taken us into His family and granted to us all of the benefits, including an unbelievable inheritance, of being in His family. Of course the world, which does not understand Him, does not understand us either. Understood or not, we are still the children of God. When Jesus returns or as He greets us in heaven, we will recognize Him immediately and at that moment we shall be like Him. I believe that we will be like Jesus in a spiritual sense, not physically. What a moment that will be! Our inheritance is an eternity in heaven without sin, sickness, sorrow or death. That is what I call a Father’s love. Have you accepted the Father’s love?

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