What attracts you to something or someone?
Oooh, Shiny! From flashy cars to solid gold toilets, from she-or-he’s cute to pretty eyes or great figure, we are culturally conditioned to be captivated by charms that glitter, and charms of a suitor.
From infancy.
“Babies,” writes Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, “can’t tell a diamond-coated Rolex from a Timex, but new research shows that kids favor putting shiny objects into their mouths over matte materials.”
And fish. Fish like shiny things.
The One Year Bible Reading for today includes Matthew 17:27 where Peter is instructed to throw a line with a hook in the water and the first fish he catches will have a shiny coin in its mouth.
Not unusual wrote one commentator. “That fish should seize a bright object which might drop into the sea is nothing uncommon. A cod has been found with a watch in its stomach, still going.”
But this was not any fish, but rather it was the first fish, and it was the exact fish that was at the exact place where Peter’s hook – not net – would be cast, and that exact fish at that exact place at that exact time that Peter’s hook would settle to the bottom right in front of its exact nose, would have the exact amount of shiny in its mouth.
Obviously, the lesson here for the bumbling, stumbling Peter who, in the previous chapter, had gone from ‘Rock’ to stumbling block in about the time you can say ‘oh, for crying out loud!’ was here in the fish story to learn that it’s not shininess but trustworthiness that is so attractive.
And now as I write this the tears form again.
Tomorrow will be my second Grief Share class to help me deal with the loss of my wife just 10 months ago.
In my wife, to whom I was married for 50 years, I found exactly that which made her so attractive. Not the shininess of infatuation, superficial and obsessive, but trustworthiness, faithfulness, constancy, and dependability.
Not shininess.
But substance.
