Dan Meyers: Struggles on a Fishing Boat

DAN MEYER: A few years ago, I was a commercial fisherman in Alaska. And my boss, who was in charge of us that summer, because of my honesty in saying that I could only do this for one summer and I wouldn’t be back, he really took advantage of that and just was patronizing and undermining, and pulling the rug out from under me and fining me for anything I did wrong. I had no idea how much money I was going to make and my hands were going numb, and that’s the life of a fisherman, you know? And I was beginning to wake up every morning wondering, “How can I please my boss today? What can I do to gain his favor, so that I get a paycheck at the end?” Not even realizing at the moment of those thoughts how metaphoric that was for where a lot of people are in their Christian life in relation to God.

I was mending nets with a bunch of the fishermen one day and I was sent on dump duty, to take all the old nets to the dump. I got there and you know there’s always a dump man that works at the dump and usually they’re pretty miserable and just sitting there kind of waiting for, you know, 5 o’clock to come where they can go home, and this man was sweeping the dump and he had a smile on his face. I drove in thinking, “This guy’s either got to be crazy or a Christian.” He came up to me and he said, “So you’re fishing?” I said, “Yeah.” We started talking and he asked me how much longer I have and I said, “Well, I have a week, and by God’s grace I’ll get to the end of it.” He goes, “Oh, you’re a Christian.” I said, “Yeah. Are you?” He said, “I have been for 16 years.”

I hopped off the truck and he started talking to me. I hadn’t said anything about the difficulty of what I was facing, the fear, even the immaturity in my heart that I was facing, feeling very out of my element, feeling like the youngster. Halfway through talking to me, he stopped and he looked me straight in the eye and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, “You know, you’ve had a rough summer this summer. You’ve probably let your guard down a few times and said some things you shouldn’t have said.” All was very true. And he said, “But I want you to know this. God is pleased with you.” And then he said, “Can I pray for you?” So I bowed my head, and my dump angel, Don, he prayed for me rather there in the middle of the dump and I was overwhelmed with one scripture that came to my mind at that time that I had known, but I had never known. It was Zephaniah 3:17, that “God rejoices over his children with singing.” And I thought, “How amazing is that? I mean I am a child of God and He is pleased with me, not because my life is pleasant, not because I deserve a celestial party thrown in Heaven in my name, but because God is satisfied with the work of Christ on the cross, and I can now live a life pleasing to God. And everything that I do, when I honor His name and when I fail it doesn’t mess things up, that my life is hidden and secure in Christ.” And that verse came to me at that time, a verse that I knew but I never knew, and impacted me greatly and really changed a part of me at the very core that I love sharing, because God is pleased with me and he is satisfied with the work of Christ.