A Discerning Life

For today's morning devotion @ Assembly

A group of fishermen took their fishing boat out to sea and when they had arrived at a far distance from shore, they cast their net into the deep ocean. The net gathered within its width many species of fishes. When it was filled, the fishermen drew the net up on board their boat. It was so heavy that the net almost broke apart! As the crew captain steered the boat back to shore, the other fishermen started to sort out their day’s catch. They emptied the net of fishes onto the floor board and began to sieve through the many fishes. Those that were of good sizes, they chose and kept them in a huge freezer, preserved until they can ship them to the market to sell at a high price. Those that were too small, they threw back into the sea. Those fishes that were unpopular and unwanted, they threw back into the sea for it would have been useless for them to keep these that people do not want to buy and will not bring in any income for these fishermen.

This story of the fishermen gives us a good lesson today of how we too need to live a discerning life. To live a discerning life means to live each day not as a matter of chance, of going through the motion of each day, taking everything as it comes. No. If sailors were to steer their ships in the same way as we leave our lives to a matter of chance and coincidence, no ship in this world will ever arrive at its planned destination. Living a discerning life, therefore, means that we have to be constantly making decisions every day. Decisions of how we want to behave, what we want to say, how we should say what we want to say, what we do to others, are just some of the more significant decisions we have to make each day. In addition, we are faced with many influences affecting us daily. At school, as a student, you are faced with simple but real decisions of whether or not to do your homework. You see a classmate copying his homework from another friend and you are tempted to follow because it is so easy to be lazy and not do your work. But, like the fishermen who choose the good from the bad fishes, you must also choose what is good and what is bad for you, deciding always to keep the good influences and throw out the bad. In this way, you can be sure that you are accumulating good values and treasures for your own life, and grow up to be a good person.

At school, as teachers, we make decisions each day too, perhaps, far more than our young pupils make daily. For example, we may find ourselves faced with a class of pupils who are very ill-disciplined and ill-behaved. On certain days, we find ourselves so tired and drained out from the work we do that does not ever seem to have any end. How do we bridge our responsibilities as teachers? We have to decide what is good and what is bad. We have to see that despite our tiredness, we are responsible to our pupils and with this, to choose to teach them good values.

Fishermen, as lowly educated as they may seem to us, know fully well the importance of picking and choosing their fishes. They know how to pick their fishes. As educated individuals, do we know how to balance our intelligence and character? So that our intelligence is not faring better than our characters because then, we are at risk of using our intelligence to bring harm to others. Do we see the need to make decisions of how we should live our lives? Are we wise enough to see and recognize the long term benefits of leading a discerning life? Let us ponder on these questions today. 

29 July 2011, Friday

9.13am