A friend of mine told me a story that I wanted to share with you.

His father-in-law has been an avid fisherman for over 30 years. He didn’t care for baseball, football, basketball or golf. Fishing was his passion. He talked about fishing constantly.

Nobody in his family shared any interest in fishing. He would spend hours standing on the shoreline casting into the ocean. When he visited places he was always interested to know where the best places to fish were located. Over the years he built up quite a collection of fishing poles and reels.

Finally he bought a boat to further his fishing horizons. He would sometimes spend up to ten hours a day on his boat fishing. His wife didn’t care about fishing or boats, but spent many hours with him so he would not be alone. Thirty years and many, many hours dedicated to his love of fishing and being on his boat.

So recently my friend’s wife got a text from her father. It was a picture of him holding up a fish and she was very impressed. My friend saw the photo but didn’t see anything particularly interesting about it. It wasn’t a very large fish. It wasn’t a very unusual looking fish. It was just him holding an ordinary fish.

When he asked his wife what the fuss was all about she told him that this was the very first fish he ever caught! The first after 30 years of casting and thousands of hours of reeling in, he caught his first fish.

After recovering from this somewhat shocking revelation, my friend asked, “Well…is he going to eat it?” to which she replied, “No, he hates fish!”