Our Easter miracle has gills
The Lord works in ... well, you know.
Not to brag — no big deal or anything, you guys — but I’ve picked up some followers since Christmas. I say that because this piece makes more sense if you know our family saved Jesus at Christmas, and yes, every word in this sentence is true. I chronicled the whole thing for posterity (and more importantly my canonization) here. The short version is that during an unreasonably large and slightly boozy family White Elephant on Christmas Eve, we won the ultimate prize of a beleaguered betta fish who at the time looked like Jared Leto if Jared Leto was dying for a long time in a movie about a guy dying for a long time. That fish’s name: Jesus. We took him home, and my wife nursed him back to health while stating matter-of-factly: “Jesus is supposed to die at Easter, not on Christmas.”
It’s Easter, so I figure I owe you an update as to whether or not we eventually killed Jesus.
Friend, we did not.
We saved Jesus.
Jesus survived Christmas night – a true Christmas miracle – and if you are reading this on the day I hit the send button, he survives both in the hearts of man and in a 5-gallon tank in our kids’ room.
Jesus the fish has been a welcome addition to our home, acquitting himself as a fish of noble bearing that belies a sly mischievous character. My son, who is good with dogs and babies, is also good with fish. He feeds Jesus daily and plays with him. And by plays with him I mean, he glides his finger along the side of the tank, and Jesus follows him around. I haven’t met a lot of 9-year-olds who leave me with the impression they’ll someday be a good parent, but my son does, and that’s about the highest compliment I can offer.
What we didn’t know – but we should have known from that Good Book – is that where Jesus is present, there is always the possibility of loaves (woe, for I am low-carb) and fishes (and here we pick up the plot). Over the last few months, our fam has added a second tank – a 29-gallon big boy – for a red-tailed shark and a handful of barbs.
My son has become a Fish Tank Guy.
Now, there are many types of Fish Tank Guys. There are Drug Dealer Fish Tank Guys. There are 53-and-Still-Single Fish Tank Guys. There Are I Am Throttling Down From Deadly Snakes to Aquatic Life Fish Tank Guys. There are I Don’t Get Along With Other Humans Fish Tank Guys. And there are I Think Nature Is Neat Fish Tank Guys. My kid doesn’t dress cool enough to be a drug dealer, so I think he’s a Nature is Neat Fish Tank Guy.
Jesus was a gateway fish.
We spent the winter pricing tanks, finding a stand that can hold 300 pounds, planning which fish to buy, researching which fish get along, picking up gravel and tank decor, watching YouTube videos and making a lot of trips to the fish store (shoutout to Rainy Day Fish for answering 871 questions from a curious boy.)
We’ve had some setbacks. The first one was when we started filling the tank, got it almost full and noticed the water was brown. We forgot to rinse the gravel. (If pre-rinsed gravel isn’t a thing, by the Powers of Almighty Poseidon, it should be.) We had to empty the tank out, rinse the gravel and refill the tank again, which took hours. When the tank was clean, we bagged some of the water to be tested, and we found out that tanks need more time to grow good bacteria. (Million-dollar idea: put the good bacteria on the pre-rinsed gravel. I am ready for my Shark Tank appearance now.) The fish store said our water was too clean and to come back in a week, which is forever to a little boy who has been looking forward to tiny pets he can call his own. We waited a very long week, the water tested fine, and we took home half-a-dozen fish.
Four days later, tragedy struck. We came home from a theater banquet and my son found one of his tiny tiger barbs laying motionless on a plant near the top of the tank. For his sake, I won’t detail the scene, other than to say it was heartbreaking in the way that losing a pet is an especially hard kind of heartbreaking. At one point he said, “He was a baby fish. Why would God let this happen?”
It reminded me of the time I took the kids to their first funeral, and on the ride back home my daughter asked, “Does everyone die?” You can find out what I told her instead of dodging the question by getting in a minor car accident here.
In these situations, when I am called upon to be an adult for a child, I never have anything prepared. I don’t even know where it comes from, but when I do it right, it feels like the answer was sitting there all along. I told him: “We don’t know why God lets things happen. Maybe your fish was sick for a while. Maybe these were always going to be his last few days. Maybe you gave him a beautiful home and nice fish friends to be around when he died. Maybe God had a plan for that fish, and you were part of the plan, and because of you he died in a nice place where he was loved and where it was beautiful.”
I stole a page from my dad’s playbook and buried the tiny fish that night in the garden, and I told the kids where he’s buried. That way, when they look at our yellow daffodils, they’ll know fishy is still with us.
And isn’t that the point of Easter? The triumph over death and the promise of the eternal? It’s a lesson that will play out every spring in our yard, all because we welcomed Jesus into our home at Christmas.
I’m telling you, man.
Mysterious ways.
Here's your chance to push him to a higher level of greatness by telling him that doctors deal with such senseless deaths daily. They may nurse one fish back to health for months on one hand and the next day they lose the young person they worked on that morning. It's all up to God, or that big American Standard in the sky. Well, you didn't give fishy a flush, you fed him to the neighborhood cats instead. The more I think about it, you did good with him. There's a reason I don't have kids.
Very clever, casual humor about a casualty is a fun read. I subscribed to your posts only a few short months ago, but I am already a fan. Cheers!