Can’t Catch Me, I’m a Wild Salmon

Iam from Alaska. I’m from a small town in the Bristol Bay area, which is also the number one sockeye salmon industry. Growing up I spent my summers: catching salmon, picking the salmon (out of the net), gutting salmon, smoking salmon, canning salmon, eating salmon…catching more salmon. My hands smelled like fish ALL the time. I like salmon. I like what they are about. I like eating them too.

Salmon are fiercely single minded. They do one thing in life, spawn in the exact spot they hatched in. They swim back up to Alaska. They swim fast and defensively. They have to avoid: sharks, killer whales, seals, bears, and fishermen. They swim and they swim with the one purpose in mind, THEY MUST RETURN to where they were hatched.

Wild salmon (notice I made a distinction there) is an excellent source of protein. Wild salmon (those fish that would clear mountain tops to get back home) have no time to catch nasty things like: mercury or bacteria. It’s like the story, “You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread man!” Well you can’t catch the salmon because they are on a mission. Unlike, their farmed counterparts that sit in stewed puddles, festering in filth, these guys are strong swimmers. They aren’t pausing to take a break. Picture this fish, swimming with all of it’s might and fast as they can: through the ocean, rivers, and streams. In all the hundreds of salmon I gutted, there were no worms in any of them. Nothing bad sticks to them; they swim too fast. I’m telling you, these guys push themselves as hard as they can to go back and spawn where they were hatched. They are clean and mean. They don’t dillydally along. They are single minded creatures. They are like the marathon athletes of the ocean. They aren’t messing around.

Did you know there was a difference between eating wild salmon and farmed salmon? When the “experts” tell us that salmon is a super food, they’re talking about the wild salmon. They are NOT talking about the farmed salmon. Farmed salmon haven’t had to dodge bigger animals looking at them as a meal. Those salmon are not getting leaner or stronger, they are just sitting. That really isn’t good. I can tell the difference between the meat of a farmed salmon and wild salmon. The wild salmon meat is really red, not pale like the farmed. Wild salmon have so much flavor. Farmed salmon are pale and flavorless. You see the wild salmon is out doing what he was created to do – swim fast and furious back to his birthplace. In contrast, the farmed salmon is just sitting in ponds, getting no exercise and absorbing anything floating in it’s icky water. Salmon aren’t meant to be caged like that. It does something terrible to the fish. It changes it, so it’s not the super food people think it is.

We can learn a lot from the salmon. God asks us to be single minded in our walk with Him. God says it’s good for us to be single minded. Like the salmon (who are so singular minded), we will get stronger and leaner. Or, we can live like the farmed salmon. Those filthy fish stewing in their own juices. In our Christian walk, we would do well to follow the wild salmon. If we were singular in our thoughts of God, singular in our following Him, and singular in getting to where we need to be as Christians, wow-what a world this would be. The singular minded Christian would become strong and lean. There would be power in what we did.

It’s better than the other option – the farmed salmon. If we just sit as Christians and don’t do anything like read our Bibles and pray we’ll become bad like the farmed salmon. We won’t be as good as we can be. We just can’t. Like the farmed salmon, we are just sitting, going nowhere. And like the farmed salmon we become weak, prone to illness (sin).

God asks us not to be double minded.

James 1:7-8 “For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”

God wants us to think like the salmon. He wants us to be THAT single minded. He wants our concentration to be only on one thing-Him. My old pastor used to say this all the time, “The main thing is to keep the Main Thing, the main thing.” Meaning, we have to keep God as our main focus. He is the Main Thing. Be like the wild salmon in their singular quest to return to where they were hatched, to spawn and die. They let nothing stop them until they are killed or they reach their birth place. I’m not saying go spawn and die. I am saying, be single minded, focusing only on God and become a clean, lean, Christian fighting machine.