When God Gives You a Weird Looking Fish

Welcome to week one of our mini-series, Dear Lord, This Was Not What I Was Expecting.

And yes, we're starting with fish. Weird-looking ones at that.

A personal confession: I've watched hours of River Monsters. Yep, as in that glorious show on Animal Planet. (Here's a clip.) As a quick spoiler for the series as a whole, there's a 50/50 chance that the said monster is just an overgrown catfish. Wild, but hey. Guess that's what happens when you chill on a riverbed for too long.

As we've already said, this is a mini-series focused on the unexpected. More specifically, how following God requires navigating the unexpected:

• Unexpected detours

• Unexpected people

• Unexpected answers to prayer

• Unexpected suffering

• Unexpected opportunity

And more.

(If you missed the intro, don't panic. You can loop back and read it here.)

For this week, we're looking at this topic through our first lens: theology. You'll notice us camping out on more Scripture verses and biblical characters, and that’s why.

God is not done with what we want to give up on.

He's often on paths we would not pick.

Speaking through people we do not expect.

Connecting dots we would never think to connect.

And as we say regularly around here, and will keep on saying to help get it in all our bones:

If it is not good, it is not the end.

Knowing that can be the difference between going through a process and bailing on one.

(Did I search and find a ridiculous fish picture on purpose? Yes I did.)

Where Does this Weird-Looking Fish Idea Come From?

Back in high school, I was sick. Very, very sick. And I was rocking that undiagnosable disease life.

In the midst of that, I was asking God for a very specific answer to my prayers. I looked at my seven compounding illnesses, and informed the Creator of my body that he should be aware of them, and you know...heal them, and in what order.

It's wild how our requests of God will reveal what we believe about him.

But anyway.

Point is, I had a plan. A good plan. It tied directly into my pain. It was strategic. And my prayers were sincere.

In the middle of all of that, I was introduced to this verse:

⁷ “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. ⁹ Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? ¹¹ If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" (Matthew 7:7-11 ESV)

Reading this sounded like confirmation. I was asking God for a good thing: a healed body. It struck me as a reasonable request. I wasn't asking for a supersonic jet to the moon or a tour through Santa's workshop. I just wanted to sleep. I wanted the tendonitis in my wrist to heal so I could get back to my hobbies and school. I wanted the headaches to stop.

Reasonable. Requests.

And I thought, if God was listening, he would give me my fish, so to speak.

Exactly as I had ordered it.

No. Snakes.

And then he did answer.

But not in the way I expected.

God's Unexpected Answers

God didn't heal me when I asked.

Instead, he brought the opportunity to start training seeing eye dog puppies for Guiding Eyes for the Blind. An absolute wild card. A fuzzy one at that.

I wasn't totally sold that this opportunity was from God. But I didn't know what else to do, so I went through the trainings, signed the paperwork, and an eight-week-old pup named Lia arrived in Richmond from New York. Suddenly, I was a guide dog trainer.

Sounds like a Disney movie, right?

Eh...not quite.

To be completely honest, I did not greet this adorable wild card with gratitude. I was discouraged, hurt, and angry. I felt unheard. And even though this was something objectively good to be involved with, my heart was struggling. It felt like being unseen. It felt like God didn't really care, except to “get good things out of me,” or “use me,” as we commonly say.

I remember in one of the first weeks I had Lia, I was out walking her and choking up with grief. My body hurt. She was spinning out and trying to eat the leash, as pups do. And I was about to scream and cry simultaneously.

And then I had this thought, a gentle voice in my head.

"This pup doesn't know what she's in training for, does she?"

It pulled me up short. Apparently I had the Big Guy on the line, or I was actually losing it. But I answered back, “No, no she doesn't.”

"Just like this pup, you don't know what you're in training for. But you've got to trust me."

I did cry for real after that.

The experience was so left field for me, but I could not shake the deep sense of feeling seen. And the logic of the perspective shift made sense. It was a moment where I felt like I began to catch my breath.

Maybe my life wasn't totally off the rails. It was just miles into the unexpected.

So, Is That a Personal Story, or a Biblical One?

Well, to state the obvious: no, that story is not literally in the Bible. But I can rattle off a cast of characters who likely also felt side-swiped by life.

Let's put Moses on the hot seat a second.

Moses' life is a series of wild cards. Saved miraculously at birth (Exodus 2:1–2). Stuffed into a basket and sent downriver and somehow not eaten by crocs (Exodus 2:3–4). Picked up by Pharaoh's daughter (Exodus 2:5–10). Lived in the palace. Has an identity crisis and arguably a survivor guilt complex mixed with rage and kills a dude (Exodus 2:11–15). Heads to the desert. Watches sheep and presumably moves on with his life (Exodus 3:1).

Only to have God hit him up with a burning bush decades later.

That's weird.

And then God talks to him via bush.

Also weird.

And let's get a direct quote of what God tells Moses to go and do:

⁷ Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, ⁸ and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. ⁹ And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. ¹⁰ Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” ¹¹ But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” ¹² He said, “But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”

Note something mind-blowing:

God doesn't say a thing about the plagues. Nothing about the river turning to blood. Nothing about frogs. Nothing about the angel of death and lamb’s blood on doorways. Nothing about the Red Sea parting. No heads-up about the golden calf.

This is the amount of detail Moses is given. Imagine how much of the Exodus account would hit you as unexpected if you were him.

No. Seriously. Reread Exodus and live it real time.

And it's not just Mo who got a weird experience.

• Gideon

• Ruth

• Isaiah

• Nehemiah

• Peter

Actually… if you read back and look for it, you'll notice God's movements are more unexpected than expected throughout scripture.

It really isn't shocking, by the time we get to Jesus, that we see him moving and doing things no one saw coming. That’s how Yahweh has rolled from the beginning.

Reframing Weird-Looking Fish

God only ever makes moves from a place of love.

That means when his provision comes in the form of something we did not expect, there is no malice, no games, and no cruelty behind it.

If your default mode is assuming God is not listening, not intelligent, or playing games, you can easily misinterpret his weird-looking fish responses as anything but loving.

A weird-looking fish can make you feel:

• Unseen

• Unheard

• Unloved

• Ignored

And those are serious things. All of them drive wedges between us and God. We can easily spin out, say, “He didn't answer me,” or even leave the faith, because we didn’t get the response, the life, or the person we were expecting.

What's the Alternative?

Follow God anyway.

Through the wild cards.

Into the unexpected.

We might not have seen it coming, but that doesn't mean it wasn't God all along.

We might not see the purpose in it — and maybe we won’t on this side of the grave — but that doesn't mean God can't use it.

We might have forgotten, or never really learned it, but the truth is that following Jesus comes with following him into the unknown.

Weird-fish and all.