The Fishing Trip That Healed My Father

A Father’s Day Memory

My sister came for a few days this week, and between morning coffee and late night games, we traded stories about our father like kids trading bubble gum wrapper comics. We each told stories the other had never heard, and laughed at how different a man he was as a father to each of us.

She is nine years older than me. I’m the baby of the family. By the time I started kindergarten, my siblings were already in high school and college. Daddy had years of practice by then, and the pace of his life had slowed too. Pastoring full time and working full time no longer filled every hour, so there was room for the things Daddy loved, like teaching me to catch nightcrawlers out behind the high school dugout after it rained so we could go fishing. Fishing was never just something Daddy did. It was close to who he was.

A Faded Print With a Story on the Back

My sister carried more than memories this visit. She brought a faded print Mama hung on the wall back in 1957. It has moved through a dozen houses since then, and now it hangs in my office. The colors are soft and worn, but the story behind it hasn’t faded at all.

Long before I was born, Daddy pastored a small church in Gardendale, near East Liverpool, Ohio. He also worked full time at a machine shop, and in whatever hours were left, he and the men of the church raised a new sanctuary themselves, swinging hammers instead of hiring it out.

Mama had a newborn and three more children under six. The exhaustion caught up with Daddy first. Sores and a rash broke out across his skin and wouldn’t heal, and sleep stopped coming at all. A doctor blamed nerves and suggested a vacation, something a man working multiple jobs, raising a family, and stretching every dollar could never manage.

The Spot God Took Him Fishing

Daddy knew something that doctor’s advice didn’t account for. Nothing is impossible with God.

“For nothing will be impossible with God.” Luke 1:37 (ESV)

He prayed for rest and healing, and God gave him ten to fifteen minutes of it, just enough to dream. In that brief sleep, God sent him on a fishing trip, and when he woke, God had healed him completely. The sores were gone, the itching had stopped, and he never suffered from that malady again.

Mama wrote the account on the back of the picture frame. None of us know where she ever found the print, but the quality and size suggest an outdoorsman calendar. What we do know is what Daddy said the moment he saw it. He looked at the picture and said, “That is the spot where God took me fishing.”

That picture matters to me, not because of who painted it, but because the Artist of all things loved my father enough to give him exactly what he needed, even if only in a dream. The same God who let me bait a hook beside him years later had already carried Daddy through months of pain and answered him in ten unhurried minutes with what no doctor could offer.

A Father Who Knows

The picture is a reminder to me that our heavenly Father already knows exactly what we need before we ever ask for it. He knew Daddy needed ten unhurried minutes beside a quiet stream more than he needed any vacation a doctor could offer.

Your Father God still knows exactly what you need today.