Sermon from a Salmon

"Years ago I got a sermon from a salmon.

Here's how it happened. While riding on a ferryboat to Galiano Island in British Columbia, I struck up a conversation with Mr. Thompson, a dignified and friendly gentleman who served as the Chief Clerk for the City of Vancouver.

I said, 'I've heard that after a salmon is spawned, it will swim out into the ocean, and that after an extended time something happens inside the brain of the salmon, and it will then have the overwhelming urge to return to the place where it was spawned. The salmon will swim along the coast, find the right harbor, the right river, the right stream; and finally it will get back to the very spot where it started out. How in the world does the salmon do all that?' I added, hoping it would taken as a joke, 'After all, the salmon is underwater all the way, and it has no periscope.'

Mr. Thompson chuckled, thought a bit, then replied, 'Yes, that is true, but it is even more remarkable than that. An experiment was recently carried out in which salmon eggs were removed from the stream where they had been laid and were put into another stream some distance away.' Thompson then added with a questioning grin, 'When the salmon grows up and swims out to the ocean and finally swims back home, which location will it swim to? Will it swim to the place where the eggs were laid--or to the place where they had been moved to?'

I paused for a moment, then I gave what I thought was the only sensible answer, 'The salmon will swim back to the place where the eggs had been transported, of course. That's where the salmon actually turned into a fish and got to know its environment.'

'Wrong!' said Mr. Thompson. 'The salmon will swim back to the original place where the eggs were laid.'

I was dumbfounded then, and I still am, by the uncanny built-in guidance system of the salmon.

What a sermon on the guidance of God! If God provides such a marvelous guidance for a fish, there is certainly nothing fishy about believing that He can provide guidance for us. We are far more important to God than any fish. We are created in God's own image.

God only knows how much we need His wise and loving guidance as we try to find our way through the jungle of 'this world.' And, thank God, He has personally promised His guidance."

Donald Russell Robertson- "Dear You"
1989, Word, Inc.