My mother's fish is going to die.

I'm frankly surprised the silly thing has lasted as long as it has.

Let me back up just a hair. My mother, while looking through the various store pamphlets in the Sunday paper, came across an ad for one of those fish-in-a-vase deals. You know, the marbles at the bottom, lily at the top, and fish, usually a betta, shimming around in between? Surprisingly to me, she hadn't seen them before and expressed that she thought it was a really cute idea. So for Mother's Day, I whipped one up for her.

The fish promptly died the next day.

"It was a bad batch of bettas," said the saleswoman. Well, we decided to defy the odds, and try another fish. This one is taking much longer to die, but I have no doubt that it's well on its way. You see, there are about a hundred little food pellets slowly decomposing at the bottom of the vase. I don't think "Alpha", as my mother has decided to name the betta (Ha ha. Get it? Moving on...), has ever eaten a single piece of the food. If he's survived this long, he must have eaten something. Maybe he's nibbling on the lily's roots. I dunno'. It doesn't matter a whole lot, because it's obviously not getting enough food. "Tropical fish often resist a new type of food when changing their diet," says the instructions. No kidding. "Continued use will ensure acceptance." It's been almost a month, and I've yet to see proof of that... His belly is actually bloated from malnutrition, and he constantly looks like he's weak and out of breath. He's refusing to eat the food either out of stupidity or out of principle. I'm not sure fish have principles, but it's a possibility, I suppose.

So why do I do the same dumb thing? Why do people kill themselves when their very life is handed to them? To that fish, as Philip Yancey pointed out in The Jesus I Never Knew, I am probably something of a god. I'm enormous. I am the one that makes the food appear and the light come and go. I'm trying to help the thing, but it refuses to take action. I'm not going to stuff betta pellets down its throat (for one thing, I could probably never get my hands on it long enough...), so it's up to the fish to take what's given to it and eat. But it doesn't.

"Silly fish!" we all think. "To dumb to realize that it's killing itself."

"Silly people!" I think. "We're too dumb to realize that we're killing ourselves." Well, maybe we're not all too dumb. We're too busy. Or we're too proud. Or too distracted. Or maybe afraid. Or just not observant enough. Perhaps, especially in this culture, it defies reason, so we dismiss it (I'd like one perfectly reasonable explanation for the existence of gravity. So far, science has been scratching its collective head ever since Newton as to why it exists). In the very end, the reason doesn't seem to matter much. Just like that fish, we're killing ourselves. Maybe not killing, but we often do hurt ourselves. Our growth is stunted or our health is sacrificed.

Do you ever bother to think about your faith, or do you just let it sit like food pellets on the surface of the water to sink to the bottom and slowly decay? Why am I not doing this enough? I need to fight my own stupidity, scratch the busy-ness, bury the pride, turn off and tune out the distractions, look beyond the fear, pay attention to my surroundings both physical and spiritual, let faith coexist with reason... God gives me what I need to grow, be healthy, and live as he intended. I just need to reach out and grab it.

And for the record, I think the fish should have been named Lamda.

Matthew R Green - 06/04/01