Sometimes I’m the fisherman standing on the worn planks of the shifting deck, confident in my understanding as I cast the nets deep into the places where people long and ache, worry and dream. It’s no longer new, this fishing-for-people business. Since Peter, Andrew, James and John were first called into the practice, it has been 2,000 years. We’ve been making webs of words and experience to awaken those in the murky depths to their essential nature as beloved of God. There is a miracle at the center of it all. Always there is a miracle. We know how to do this.
But sometimes I’m the fish, eyes darting back and forth as I search and search, longing, starving for the nourishment I cannot identify. I am lost. I have no words to recall myself to my essential connection. There is only endless water and a nameless dread. I cannot even articulate the question that fills my being: Where is God? Give me God!
What is the net that sweeps me up? It is made of truths known by the soul and not the intellect. The miracle explodes my awareness, tricks me into changing my focus. I look with the eyes of the heart, and all at once I am on the boat again, breathing deeply of the lake air as I look out across the water.
We need one another. When I am the fish, I need you. When I am the fisherman, I need you. We both need Christ. Christ is the mast of the boat. Christ is the net. Christ is the water in which we swim. Christ is the center of each of our hearts.