My Shark

 

In 1963 the men at Maple View Baptist Church took their sons on a deep-sea fishing trip.  We left early in the morning and got to the dock at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware about sunup.  There were about ten men and eight boys.  I was about thirteen years old at the time.  I remember that John G. got so seasick that he puked over the side of the boat most of the morning.  He gave me his rod and reel late in the morning and went down beneath.  I’m not sure if a berth on a rolling boat was any better.  The captain cut baitfish into small pieces that we skewered onto the hooks.  The ocean was about 90 feet deep, and a heavy sinker took the hook down to the bottom.  I brought up a 41” sand shark and pulled it aboard.  The captain wanted to throw it back into the sea, but I protested.  It wasn’t edible, but I thought that it was a great trophy fish to show to my mother.  We got home late in the day, but not too late to show off my shark to my brothers and my mother.  The next day it was stinking so I had to bury it.  A few years from now, when bulldozers are moving soil for a new subdivision, some foreman will find shark teeth in the ground and be amazed at where the ocean level was ten million years ago.  What he can’t know is that I buried that shark there on purpose just a few years earlier.  Hey, we can’t know what happened in the past, nor how far in the past it really was.  We can guess, but only the Creator of the universe knows exactly what happened and when.  And He told us what He did in His book, the Bible.  We can choose to believe it or not, but that doesn’t change the truth nor the past.  David said in Psalm 90:2, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”  You can believe God or believe the opinion of a bulldozer operator.  The choice is yours.