Fishing for nothin'

Someone recently asked me what I wanted for my birthday.

Ultimately I ended up telling them I could use a new lamp since mine broke earlier this week. And later on for the fifth year running I blew out my candles wishing I could go fishing.

I think this might very well be the year.
A few weeks back as I was thinking about how silly it is to keep wishing for it and never just going and doing it, I realized... if I take the hook off my fishing pole, I don't have to worry about catching anything. I'll be able to sit lakeside and "fish" to my hearts content. I can enjoy the quiet, peaceful serenity of 'going fishing' without any of the mess and smell that comes with actually having fished. I also don't have to worry about having done it wrong.
There are a lot of rules to fishing. Don't catch anything too small or too large, the wrong gender, the wrong breed. And I don't know enough about fish to recognize those things.
And, heaven help me if I actually caught something, because then I'd have to figure out what to do with it then.

And as I considered how much easier fishing would be without a hook, I realized with a start, what a good analogy that was for Christians today. We all want the serenity of God, the peace of His Spirit, yet when it comes down to "fishing for men" we take the hooks off, so no one will feel the pain of being pulled out of the water, and we'll never have to deal with the fact that the fresher your catch is, the more they smell. You don't have to worry about knowing the rulebook, and knowing all the answers or finding yourself being followed around by fish that our Religious Fishing Guide states should be thrown back in the water until they've grown a bit.

Best of all, if you sit at the side of the lake, holding a pole, and your little bobber bobbing in the water... no one knows you aren't really fishing.
And you don't exactly want to boast about the fact that you're hookless fishing...
Cause everyone knows fishing without a hook would be dumb.
Right?