Your Provision

Lord,
Reading Luke 5 this morning. You tell your friends to push out into deep water, and to let down their nets.

They have let their nets down before. They have toiled all night. The deep has been closed to them, and their efforts fruitless.

You say, go back. Return to what has never born fruit. Set yourself once more into vulnerability, and wait. See what I will do.

Lord Jesus, I have weighed these nets. I have measured them, and repaired their tears from every misadventure and every declination. If I have recovered at all, it has only been very recently. Lord, how should I feel? How should I trust? All has ended in vanity, all in futility. I am tired, and weighed down with fears and doubts.

The sea is very large, Lord.  I cannot comprehend it. And it grows deeper; I cannot fathom it.

Tell me Jesus. Have you felt these tears? Have you felt this despair? Tell me Jesus. Do you know the depths of shame and horror and fear? The disgust and self-loathing and hopelessness and dread of wrongs so wrong done by us and wrongs so wrong done to us. Jesus! Do you know the rage and the vanity and the hopelessness and the tears? Tell me Jesus. Tell me.

I want to throw up. I want to vomit, to release the sickness in my gut but there is insufficient bile to drive it from my stomach and there is no bile of the soul. There no pressure than can expel what can only be known as brokenness, as not-joy. It has settled into the deep, like a net weighed down.

Row out into the deep. Gentle, now.

There are too many layers to count, too many to peel back, to measure or understand. I have no control, whether I stay or go. I am in the deep regardless. And I can sit in the bottom of the boat wrapped in nets and floats and weights, safe from sharp pain and safe from the striving which cannot answer the pain that remains, adrift on the open sea without water, food or beauty. Or I can let my nets down once more. They will be filled with tears again and perhaps for nothing. They will be filled again with the bitter salt-water that holds both life and death and every possibility and every eventuality, and every fear, and every secret hope.

I will let them down because you ask me to, Jesus. Because your scars are greater than mine, surround and envelope mine. My scars remain, but seem part of yours now, somehow. Moving the nets feels like pulling out long stitches, half-healing threads woven into my heart that can only now be extricated by a slow, gentle pulling and lowering of that thread into the sea.

Trusting you this morning feels less like rising and filling, and feels more like emptying and lowering. I am pressed out, thinner than before- perhaps now you can see the altar through me.