Rainbow Trout
November 10, 2026
November 10, 2026 – Daily Devotional
Among the many photos my mother has saved is one from 1972 of me holding up a rainbow trout. I had hurt my elbow playing baseball and spent the entire summer in a cast. For vacation, we visited family in northern Arkansas and stopped at Dogpatch USA, a hillbilly-themed park based on the old comic strip.
The trout pond was so well stocked that I caught a fish before my bobber ever hit the water. Mom and Dad had it wrapped, packed in ice and ultimately into our freezer. As a kid, I would pull it out to show friends. I stayed there for years; well into my 20s.
It took me decades to realize what it took to get that fish home. Dogpatch wasn’t our last stop. My parents had to buy an ice chest and keep refilling it, mile after mile, all the way back to Pauls Valley, to protect a silly fish for a boy who never thought to ask. I never saw the trouble. I only saw the trout. Recently I called Mom just to say thank you for something she did 54 years ago.
Isn’t that how most blessings arrive? We hold up the catch and forget who kept the ice.
Being part of St. Luke’s is like that. We look at the beauty of our sanctuary, listen to the music, and see the impact of our missions in Oklahoma City and around the world. But none of it simply appeared. In the 1950s, the ladies of this church fried chicken and sold it at the state fair to help pay for this sanctuary. Someone refilled the ice, year after year, so that what mattered would still be here when we arrived.
Have you ever thought about the trouble the people before us went through to make today possible? Dr. Long often reminds us of the “saints on whose shoulders we stand.” I picture some of them in aprons, working a hot fryer at the fairgrounds, never imagining the faces that would one day fill these pews. They did what they were called to do for people they would never see.
Some stories are about the one that got away. This one is about the people who made sure it didn’t.
Now it’s up to us. We don’t give only for our children and grandchildren, but for those we’ll never meet. Somewhere there are families who haven’t yet walked through our doors and will someday call St. Luke’s home. They won’t know whose hands kept the ice, and they won’t need to. But they are counting on us to make the sacrifice, to keep refilling the cooler so that what we were given reaches them whole. One day, we will be the saints on whose shoulders someone else stands.
-Chris Lambert, Director, Meals on Wheels OKC
