Free Will and Fly Fishing

It occurred to me, there is a direct correlation between fly fishing and free will.

 I have often said that the greatest gift and greatest curse God gave humanity is our free will.  In God's infinite wisdom, we were given the ability to make choices on our own. Even the choice NOT to honor or admit the existence of God. It was this same free will that lay at the cause of the first sin; exercising our free will to disobey God.

 It may seem quite a stretch to apply free will to fly fishing, so hear me out.

 I have a fly box filled with flies. Each fly in that box represents a choice that I made. In choosing each fly, I eliminated all other choices. When I reach into that box, select a fly and tie it onto my fly line, I have made yet another choice. I have chosen this particular fly because it appealed to me at the time. In my estimation, it has the greatest chance of tricking a fish.

 Then exercising yet more free will, I cast that fly in a particular place where I think it has the best chance of catching a fish.

 Free will does not end there.

 Sadly, most casts do not end up with a fish at the end of my line. Hence, I am faced with more choices: place the fly in another location, change the fly, pause and drink a soda, give up and go home.

 My point is this: I confess in the sequence I have outlined so far, God seems to play a very small part in the decisions I made. We mistakenly feel that the decisions we made were somehow outside of God's will; that God was absent in each of those decisions. We may even go so far as to say that God "blessed" us with an abundant catch or God "cursed" us and we caught nothing.

 That's because we look at the result of the process, or perhaps even the sequence of choices, and conclude that everything we did was our own personal decisions. True. But . . . were it not for God, and this gift/curse of free will, we would not have had a choice.

 So, the next time you head to the grocery store to pick up a few things, and someone is driving too slowly in front of you, and you can't find a parking place, and they have sold out of what you wanted, don't blame God! Blame all the choices that were made.  

 And remember to thank God you HAD as choice to make.

 Me? I'm going fishing and exercise some free will.
I wonder . . . do fish have free will?  

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