Mr Fisherman, you were once just a boy.

I met this fisherman on the seafront the other day. I thought i'd ask to take his portrait and i had a real nice chat with him. I felt too self-concious to take proper shots - but i wish i'd taken some better ones, with all the fish he had. I took this one through an old window and then felt very aware that i didn't know what i was doing or how to use my camera, so stopped! Ah well. Maybe i'll go and find him again on another day. He had a great face though and such a gentle character, and the way he was concerned about his appearance made me laugh. He said "there isn't any fish-blood on me is there?!"... i told him there wasn't, but have since noticed some on his jacket. It's strange to think that once he was just a little boy. Maybe he knew nothing about fishing or how to be a fisher-man, but with time he learnt.

Anyway, the reason i am including his picture, is simply because it links to something i just read by Spurgeon. It goes as follows:

"And Jesus saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."—Matthew 4:19.

When Christ calls us by his grace we ought not only to remember what we are, but we ought also to think of what he can make us. It is, "Follow me, and I will make you." We should repent of what we have been, but rejoice in what we may be. It is not "Follow me, because of what you are already." It is not "Follow me, because you may make something of yourselves;" but, "Follow me, because of what I will make you." Verily, I might say of each one of us as soon as we are converted, "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." It did not seem a likely thing that lowly fishermen would develop into apostles; that men so handy with the net would be quite as much at home in preaching sermons and in instructing converts. One would have said, "How can these things be? You cannot make founders of churches out of peasants of Galilee." That is exactly what Christ did; and when we are brought low in the sight of God by a sense of our own unworthiness, we may feel encouraged to follow Jesus because of what he can make us. What said the woman of a sorrowful spirit when she lifted up her song? "He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes." We cannot tell what God may make of us in the new creation, since it would have been quite impossible to have foretold what he made of chaos in the old creation. Who could have imagined all the beautiful things that came forth from darkness and disorder by that one fiat, "Let there be light?" And who can tell what lovely displays of everything that is divinely fair I lay yet appear in a man's formerly dark life, when God's grace has said to him, "Let there be light?" O you who see in yourselves at present nothing that is desirable, come you and follow Christ for the sake of what he can make out of you. Do you not hear his sweet voice calling to you, and saying, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men?"