This past year, I’ve often felt like Peter, casting out earlier than my peers to fish and return to my home empty-handed. Building a business is hard. I caught a few here and there, but not enough to justify the long hours, the stress, and the instability. My wife made it clear that it was nearing time for me to join another fishing crew or attempt a career change.
Then, a week ago, I heard in prayer, “Cast your nets on the other side.”
For a full week, I obsessively asked Him to reveal what the “other side” meant.
Was I supposed to change services? Change audiences? Change roles? Change my focus?
Then, on Friday, after months of making a thousand here and a few hundred there, I locked in 47k in business in one day. What did I do differently?
Nothing.
And that was the point.
In my prayer today God make it clear that the point of this provision was not to find a technique or trade secret to change my life.
The point was that my self-reliance was a joke and that God’s provision is so overwhelmingly abundant that it completely changes the nature of the business I’m in.
I’m still digesting this lesson, but I know that what God truly wants from me is my complete and total allegiance. Success and admiration used to be idols. God can prune idols by suffering, but sometimes he prunes them with abundance.
Have you ever played a game for hours only to discover it was rigged or unwinnable?
Maybe something like that happened to Peter. Maybe it became clear to him that despite all he’d learned, no new tackle, nets, or techniques would help him at all unless God himself told him to use them. Maybe he learned that day that the only REAL rule of fishing was “do as the master commands.”
I’m coming to find that to be true. I used to ask for God’s help and the Holy Spirit’s council only when I was required to make a serious decision with profound consequences.
Now I’m asking God whether I should get up to go to the bathroom now or later. Increasingly, I find that all that I do apart from Him is chaff, while what I did months before with him is still bearing fruit.
Children, do you have any fish?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some. So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because of the quantity of fish.”
John 21:5-7
Really enjoyed this post! Thanks for sharing.