I want to tell you about a man named Denny Brauer. Denny was a bricklayer, and made a good living at it. But he had another passion - bass fishing. One day in 1980 Denny came home and revealed the deepest desire of his heart, which no doubt shocked his wife to the core. He wanted to move from their home in Nebraska to a place where he could fish - full time - as a professional bass fisherman.

I guess you can imagine Denny's wife thought of this. Jack McCallum in Sports Illustrated captured their prospects nicely when he wrote, "Deciding that you wanted to make a livable wage as a bass angler in 1980 wasn't quite as risky as deciding that you wanted to make a livable wage as, say, a marble shooter, but it was close."

But amazingly enough, Denny's wife said, "Well, let's go!" And they packed up and moved to where the fish were.

It turned out to be the right move, too. Two decades later, Denny Brauer has a Saturday morning fishing show on ESPN, "The Bass Class with Denny Brauer," as well as two instructional videos and a couple of books. He has endorsement deals with so many companies that when he goes to a tournament to fish, he is festooned with so many logos that he looks like a NASCAR driver. Brauer is doing quite well since he made the transition from bricklayer to fisherman - In one recent year, he earned almost $800,000 in prize money and endorsements.

Denny Brauer is a man who made a gutsy, courageous career change to pursue his passion of fishing. As they say, it's nice work if you can get it. But our scripture tells the story of four fishermen who themselves made a dramatic career change, so to speak, trading one kind of fishing for another, after Jesus of Nazareth came walking by the Sea of Galilee one day.