A Fishy Tale

Yesterday, I got home a little early (around 5pm) to do a little straightening up before my family got home so we could hang for a minute before I went back up to the office for a meeting at 6pm. Our 24 gallon aquarium has about 6 little fish. Pam went over to clean the filters right when she got home because I hadn’t messed with them in a few months. We didn’t realize you have to turn off the pump before taking out the filters, and the tank went from crystal clear to dark and murky within a few seconds. Panic ensued.

We started netting the fish out of the tank into a plastic bowl of tap water. I drained all the dirty water out of the aquarium. Then, I had to leave for my meeting. I don’t want to use tap water in the tank so that I don’t have to worry about all the hard water and lime. I figure, the less I have to deal with upkeep, the better off we are, and the better the fish will be. I have a 5 gallon bottle of water that I fill at those water vending machines for about $1.50.

After the meeting, dinner, putting the kids to bed and 4 trips to get water and new filters, it’s 11pm. I put the fish in a totally new environment, back into the aquarium for another shock to their systems, started the pump and called it a night. This morning, we’ve got a crystal clear tank and, as far as I can tell, only 1 of the fish succumbed overnight. I hope the algae eater makes it.

Let me make a spiritual application: As fishers of men, how many times do we take people and bring them into a completely foreign environment in our churches? We shouldn’t shock their systems, we do that when church is a time warp taking people back many decades, wherever the church got stuck. Instead, our goal should be to provide a comfortable opportunity for people to hear and respond to the truth of God’s word. When someone chooses to step inside our environment, we want them to feel like they’re at home. And we do everything we can to make that a reality every week.