No fisherman should work or eat alone

I woke up this morning to a typical beautiful, sunny day. As I was drinking African tea in my tiny mud house on the Island of Lake Victoria, I watched people go about their business. All these people have arrived to the island from different ends of Uganda and neighboring countries.

They are fishermen and work very much as a community. They are a village and together they build it. They have a common saying: “No fisherman works alone and no fisherman eats alone.

Last night a storm washed back into the lake most of the “mukene” or silver fish they had laid out to dry on the hills earlier that day. This morning women and children were selecting thousands of tiny fish to bring back up to the hill and discarding the fish that had gotten spoiled. This reminds me of the vast task we have: to go out and work together, as fishermen do, from dusk to dawn; in the tempestuous nights, as well as in the quiet and calm; in the dangerous waters, and in the peaceful lakes; mending the nets together, throwing them together and as one team, pulling them in to shore, together.



I see the call of Mark 1:17 repeat itself daily in the African waters: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” If the contemporary church had the same approach toward laboring for God as the fishermen of Lake Victoria, working together as one, we would have committed church members seeking to pull together in the same direction: the Kingdom of God.

Ironically, the very fishermen who remind me of the Great Commission are the same people to whom we need to throw out the net of the gospel, bringing them to Christ. Many of them are lost in their ancestral ways and urgently need God, even if they do not admit it. Let us mend our nets, throw them out together, pull them together, and in due time, we shall all sit at the table together. No fisherman should work or eat alone.

~Ruth Palomo

Ruth was born and raised in Mexico, where she first heard the gospel from a missionary couple. After graduating from the Hispanic Institute of Ministry, she moved to Uganda to share the love of Christ with the people living there.