Introducing Mending the Line

Last summer, I took up fly fishing. It’s very hard, and I am very bad. The idea and the equipment are very simple. You use a rod, a reel, line, and a fly that imitates what fish eat. Your job is to place that fly where there are fish who want to eat it. Simple.

But learning how to do it well requires hours and hours of practice. Like learning how to ride a bike, swing a golf club, or play chords on a guitar, you have to build up a deep muscle memory in order to consistently be able to put the fly where there are fish who want to eat it. Then, of course, you have to know where the fish will be, and what kind of fly most closely imitates what they are eating in that moment.

Part of putting the fly where the fish will be is learning a technique called “mending the line,” which is managing the way the line floats on the water so the fly is carried along by the current as naturally as a real bug would be. To mend the line, you have to pick the line up and turn it over and over as it drifts down the current. It’s simple. It’s just not easy.

Mending the line is a good way to think about what it means to follow the way of Jesus. The spiritual life is not about doing anything new, it’s about taking up ancient practices and patterns and turning them over and over and over as they, and we, float along the current of the world and our lives in this unique moment.

In the extended season of change and institutional uncertainty in which the church finds itself, we’ve spent years anxiously chasing the fix, the solution, the new thing that will restore us to what we imagine we once were. I am convinced that our future is ancient, and that finding our way forward isn’t about pursuing what is novel, but returning to the practices and patterns of prayer, Bible study, shared life, and standing with the poor and marginalized that have always marked and sustained the Jesus movement in the world. Our work in this moment is mending the line.

I will use this space as an ongoing conversation and reflection on this work of mending the line. I will post my weekly messages to the Diocese of Minnesota, as well as occasional sermons and other meditations. I hope you will find it useful, and that it can contribute to the work we all share of stewarding the treasures that have been entrusted to us from our ancestors, as we stand together in the part of the river we’ve been called to , and hope it will contribute to how we tend to the part of God’s river that we have been called to stand in.

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