Our New Fishbowl
By Mike Inger Helmke
I have a few plants on the floor by the window in the corner of my living room. One of the pots is quite big, containing almost a mini jungle. There are two little palm trees in it that almost reach the ceiling, their stems surrounded by some creeping green leaves. At the bottom are a few smaller grasslike plants, and even two orchids thriving in the shade. Then somebody gave me a little fishbowl that I put on the soil between the leaves.
I have a hammock next to this plant’s pot where I can relax and meditate. And that’s what I did one day. I got comfy in my hammock and tried to meditate and make contact with God, when somehow I had the impression that He wanted me to look at the fish. I wondered why. I love nature. It makes me feel good, and I always think God speaks to me through nature. But why look at the fish?
I looked at the fish for a while, and then remembered that I hadn’t changed the water for a few days. So I got up and grabbed the little bowl by its top edge to take it to the kitchen. It all happened very quickly! The glass was too flimsy for my grip and suddenly broke. The little bit of water that had been a home for my fish was immediately absorbed by the soil, and the little fish was wiggling between the plants.
I quickly ran to the kitchen and got a glass of water, poured some of it over him, and tried to get him between my fingers. I put him into the cup, and soon my fish was resting in a big see-through plastic mug. I was a bit worried about his health, but he soon recovered from the shock and was happily swimming in his new makeshift home. Eventually I found a better vessel, and now he is back between my plants.
I felt a little bad. I thought that maybe it would have been better if I had just meditated and watched the fish instead of getting up to change the water. Actually, I really wondered why in the world God had wanted me to look at that little fish at all. It seemed as if things had gone totally wrong before I ever understood whatever He might have wanted to tell me. It took a little time of pondering that incident, but then I started to catch the meaning of it all.
At first it was just a cute little allegory for me. I had destroyed the poor little guy’s whole world in just one moment. There was no way to mend it again. It was just totally gone, and my little friend was lying on the ground between its broken pieces, ready to die. Thank God he got a new little world and keeps on living happily.
In like manner, our world is being destroyed. I can feel the climate changing around me: drought, crazy extreme rainfall, bees becoming extinct, poisoned and weakened. Yet ignorance is so dominant, it just seems as though it will take far too long to convince people to change their habits and preserve the environment that is our home before it is too late. And I can’t shake off that feeling that it’s getting too late.
I got very discouraged about the fact that people can be so blind, and there seems to be no change in sight. Of course, I know that one day Jesus will come back and restore everything, but what about now? In a way, nobody really wants to believe that this beautiful world is doomed and headed for destruction. That horrible feeling just wouldn’t leave me. The idea that no matter how hard we try, things don’t seem to change, had become pretty dominant in my life.
This little event reminded me that God is perfectly able to restore this world again. Just like me putting the fish into a new glass, He can make a whole new world. Strangely enough, I couldn’t stop thinking about that broken world of my little friend and how easy it was to rescue him and get him a new one. Slowly but surely it wasn’t just “quite a nice idea” anymore, but it became a consistent theme on my mind. The longer I thought about it, the more I realized how wonderful it is, how easy it is for God to make all things new.
Maybe God never promised to preserve and save and mend our world forever. Maybe it will be totally destroyed and come to an end one day. But God won’t leave us to die on the ground. Heaven and earth may pass away, but He won’t, and His loving hands won’t leave us either. One of the last verses in the Bible says, “Behold, I make all things new!”1 And a little later He says, “Behold, I come quickly!”2 When it reaches that point, He’s going to come quickly, pick us right up, and put us into a whole new world.
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