Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk. There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them. They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthetized a child-like mind trapped in the deterioration of a thirty-five year old body. It was a mere trinket, a point of focus upon which to forget the real...
Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk. There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them. They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthetized a child-like mind trapped in the deterioration of a thirty-five year old body. It was a mere trinket, a point of focus upon which to forget the realities that had bent him and ultimately broken him. It served as a pathetic distraction from all that had cut thick furrows across his head and heart far too early and far too prematurely. It was a cheap, plastic fish.
The years had stooped his gait and lined his hair with ever lighter shades of premature gray, cutting deep fissures across his brow and thickening young skin. His gait had been reduced to a shallow shuffle, dragging thick shoes across coarse pavement. He wore the soles thin on the outsides edges, further canting his gait. His soul was much the same, deeply worn along the outside edges as well; throwing into a precarious imbalance the cadence of an already distorted life. Darren found himself limping through a world that placed ultimate premiums on that which is new, believing that any value is inherent only in the degree of newness any object possesses. The world viewed his worn edges as old, used up and spent. He was unfairly evaluated as discarded humanity and rendered invisible to the eye of a world too busy.
Baggy pants were thread thin at the knees and frayed at the pockets with stitching pulled and strained at variant seams. An oversized shirt bespoke of his desperate efforts to fit in life. Like his shirt, it never happened. Stained and limp, a faded handkerchief hung from a weary pocket. A mouthful of decay filled each smile and poured out in each conversation. Chapped lips were edged thick by coarse stubble sprouting from a grimy bed of mottled skin. The expanse of his squared jaw and sunken cheeks were covered with a bumper crop of inattention. His words were primitive and slurred; rolling off his tongue in seamless bursts that made comprehension nearly impossible. Shoulders were drawn down by the weight life had exerted on him, pulling him forward in a Neanderthal sort of cadence that was long and slothful. And he wanted to show me his plastic fish.
“Kind of like the disciples, huh? They caught fish. They were fishermen!” he said. A broad smile of decay anticipated a hearty response from me. Darren was thirty-five, yet he was enamored with a dollar store plastic fish. “Like the disciples, huh?” His persistence accelerated my desire to talk to a real adult. Church was over and there were many candidates milling about. My momentary objective was to determine how to terminate this infantile conversation and find someone with some shred of intelligence that I could talk to. I moved to close the conversation with Darren and did so quite deftly I thought. He would have no idea that I had just ditched him. As I stepped away from him, he held the plastic fish in his weathered hands as if it were a precious treasure and muttered softly to himself, “I was a sinner, now I’m a fisher of men too.”
God Strikes
There are unexpected moments in life when God sends simplicity as a blinding light that is far more pure and infinitely more superior than all the intellectual musings I could devise. Darren’s words . . . “sinner” and now “fisher of men”, though soft, backlit my soul in blinding light and thundered through the very core of my ego-centric spirit. They rocked me, simultaneously illuminating my flagrant sense of superiority as paper thin and backlighting my egotistical self against something far greater and far grander. A light both brilliant and revealing was thrown onto something I had unknowingly lost in the dark pool of piousness and shallow Christianity that I had cultivated. “Sinner” and “fisher of men” represented two opposite ends of life. One was represented by sin sheathed in death on one end, and that of salvation and the humanly unexplainable privilege of salvation on the other. He had seized something spiritually authentic that was indefinably powerful because of its innocent simplicity.
His words drew me down with my soul melting into repentant puddles on the pavement and pooling around Darren’s feet. And in my heart a stark thought shot through my brain. It seized my heart and surged through my soul as the light exposed the grotesqueness of my immaturity . . . “go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV). I had rarely felt so abjectly ugly and so starkly far from God. I was sickened by myself with nowhere to run in order to get away from myself. Darren had brilliantly backlit my life with a hand full of simple words, a plastic fish and an innocent life. I was repulsed by what I saw in the blinding light.
Fish and Light
The cool of the night aimlessly drifted by. Time drifted listlessly with it. Waves gently lapped the weathered wooden hull as if the night was completely pacified with simply existing. Sails flapped passively, rolling in a dance with an occasional listless breeze that floated out from somewhere deep in the night. The timbered creaking of shifting weight was soft against the darkness. Oars dipped deep and silently, spinning tiny whirlpools of water that softly gurgled in the thin veil of satin moonlight. The damp scent of water gathered in a thin, veneer layer of mist that tentatively skirted the water’s surface. The night was intermittently rendered musty with the odors of nets wet with nothing but water. A distant heron hauntingly called into the night from a far shore. Muffled voices and the lights of other boats drifted listlessly across the water.
Nets were cast in a perfectly spinning arch, pirouetting to the rhythm of the night as they were launched by thick arms sure with experience. Slapping the water, they were given a moment to sink into the night of the lake. Descending, the keel of the boat became smaller in the submerged descent. The chalky white moonlight was shattered into a million moving shards of milky light on the underside of the waves, fading as the depths were listlessly plumbed. The water cooled, darkened, and was stirred by soft currents. All was listless in a dreamlike descent.
And then there was a massive tug initiated by the same sure arms of experience. The net reeled and folded in upon itself, instantly enfolding everything within it. A series of firm tugs follow in a different kind of rhythm that was much less peaceful and much more intentional. Lunging toward the surface the net broke the liquid plane and was hauled into the coarse belly of the boat.
Again it was the same. There was nothing in the nets embrace but weeds, water and disappointment. A gruff remark, and then a curse edged rough with the abrasion of frustration cut the night and oozed the pus of anger into the boat’s belly. Frustration was manifest and coarsely expelled into the night by exasperated fishermen whose finest skills could not coerce the deep waters to offer up their bounty. The waters stubbornly chose to withhold their living treasures. The net was hurriedly prepared by frustrated hands and launched again, and again, and again. Frustration layered upon frustration until nothing other than frustration defined the whole of the night.
The moon slowly descended to sleep behind the horizon. The multitude of stars drifted across the expanse of the velvet blackness, moving in unison with the turn of the universe and the winds of heaven nudging them to the same horizon. Night would soon drift into day. The nets remained empty. Soon the sun stirred with the first tentative band of pastel thin light on a yawning horizon, softly illuminating empty boats. So went the night.
This was Simon Peter’s world, that of his father and his grandfather. His was a lineage of weary boats, hemp nets, flapping fish glinting in flashes of silver, sails and storms. He was isolated within the world of trolling by night as the fish rose to cooler waters and sleeping by day. Lost in this world of his, he was so engrossed in its demands that he was defined by that world, having standardizing everything else by its shape and form. This world of nighttime fishing and the life that goes with it dictated the shape, tenor and tone of his life. It was so familiar and natural that becoming it, for Simon Peter, was being nothing less than who he was and where he needed to be.
There was little thought of anything else for he knew nothing else. No other world other than the methodical frustration of sparse nets, contrary winds, too few fish to market leaving purses thin with coinage, long nights followed by exhausted days with the only promise being more of the same . . . nothing other had backlit his life enough to see anything any different.
In His World
There was an unexpected intrusion in Simon Peter’s tiny world. A carpenter turned prophet found His way to this place of nets, nights and weary men. Word had spread carrying rumors of miracles that had long drifted across the lake, having reached the shoreline and lapped against the wooden hulls of the docked boats. It was likely that many of the fishermen had gotten wind of Jesus as their sails might have caught a slight breeze.
But it was of little import. Rather, it was an inconvenience. Like too many nights, the night had been long and fruitless. The nets had yielded nothing more than water, weeds and weariness. There were no fish to market that day. The lake and the night had joined forces to deny these hunters of the deep any trophy. The coming night would be pressed with the need to make up for a night lost. It was time for sleep, troubled sleep at best, but sleep nonetheless. Yet, despite the need for sleep there was an intrusion . . . of all days.
The crowd grew, giving some degree of credibility or celebrity to whoever this was. These frustrated fishermen picked up a few words here and there, discerning pieces that remained only pieces within the fatigue that enshrouded their minds. Religion won’t catch fish and nice words won’t mend nets. Sweeping platitudes won’t feed hungry families, and brazen prophecies won’t raise wily fish from elusive depths.
But Simon Peter had seen what the winds of rumor had only blown. A mother-in-law had been healed by this itinerant Jesus person. The crippled walked pensively but surely on unfamiliar legs with crutches joyously abandoned at their feet as a necessity that was instantly rendered unnecessary. The blind stumbled in the attempt to align faces with voices for the first time, turning to drink in deep blue skies and finding themselves hopelessly enamored by mounds of brilliant wildflowers. The pallor of death was swept from the faces of catatonic infants with tiny arms and thin legs instantly washed alive with vitality that had no explanation, except . . . He had seen it.
Simon Peter had attempted to correlate all of that with his world of boats, frayed nets, canvas sails and fish. The experience and the exposure had not changed him yet. It was only an anomaly because his world had not been directly intersected. What he had observed was wonderment, but wonderment that had taken place some distance outside the parameters of his tiny and predictable world of wooden boats and hemp nets. It had yet to manifest itself dead center in that world and to render everything entirely less than predictable.
However it happened, Jesus was suddenly in Simon Peter’s boat; dead center in Simon’s world . . . ground zero. Suddenly his boat was turned into a podium and a fisherman was turned into a chauffeur. From the bow of this tired fishing vessel the words of Jesus droned on. It’s not that they weren’t compelling. It’s just that they fell upon a mind dulled with fatigue and deluged with both empty nets and empty pockets. Sometimes the greatest messages are missed because the human mind is occupied with a miniscule net of fish drawn from some tiny puddle when the Fisher of Men is standing right in their boats casting a net into the whole ocean of men.
Scripture does not indicate what Jesus said that struck Simon, it’s what He did. And then, the command came. The nets had already been mended, cleaned and stowed. Weary sails had been drawn tight and tied. Arms were weak and heads were fuzzy. The fish had undoubtedly descended to cooler waters, far beyond the reach of their nets and all of their accumulated skills. And yet this Jesus wanted to go fishing. The logical argument was of no use. A lifetime of experience was discarded and discounted by this Teacher. He was confidently insistent. And so, wearily Peter mumbles, “But because you say so, I will let down the nets” (Luke 5:5, NIV). And he does.
Oars are lowered by weary fishermen who exchanged glances washed in confusion, anger and a slight flush of stupidity for agreeing to this idiotic venture. Plunged into cool waters, awakened oars create spiraling eddies in their wake. The morning sun was now full, having long lifted itself off the horizon of a new day, spilling a cascade of gold that broke into sparkling flecks of yellow glitter on gentle waves. Oars were drawn in with glistening droplets falling from their weathered edges, ever so quickly catching a slight fleck of sunlight before becoming lost in the waters below. Arms of experience grasped the nets, spread them and deftly launch them in perfect flight. Again, they slapped the surface of the water as they had a hundred times the night before. A thousand times maybe. This time however, it was different.
Backlighting
Instantly there was a slight tug. Then, the nets were seized and sent wildly convulsing. The pull was overwhelming, catching the strength and experience of even the most seasoned fisherman entirely off guard. Strained arms were etched with protruding veins. Faces were flushed red. The boat listed under the weight as nets were hoisted to the surface. Drawing against the collective resistance, the surface was broken in an explosive torrent of foaming water and flailing fish. The morning sun caught and threw the first silver glint of hundreds of thrashing fish reflected riotously in the churning waters. The water was agitated, surging white and frothy with the multitude of the catch.
Simon Peter was astounded, his mind gaping with the inability to correlate what he saw with what he knew. A sudden panicked call went out to other boats. They scurried and cast off in pell-mell and chaotic fashion; experienced fisherman completely inexperienced with netting the impossible. Oars plunged deep and hard, frantically pulling against morning’s water. A small army of boats surged forward, creating panicked wakes. The catch spilt as a silver torrent into other hulls. Boats creaked, listed and then dropped to the water line, rolling fat with the bulky weight of the catch.
Simon Peter was caught in the breech of trying to draw in nets that were fraying and snapping while correlating the event in his own mind. For him, it was irreconcilable. It did not match his world or his experience. He was thrust beyond his limited sphere by an event that had occurred in his world, in the very center of it, right in the middle of who he was and what he did.
It was entirely other worldly, smacking of something supernatural even. Every sense and sensation of the miracle was inserted into the very center of his life to blow him beyond that center. His life was now held in sharp and poignant relief against something incomprehensibly greater and immeasurably grander than he. He was no longer compared solely to his world; a comparison which once gave him permission to mindlessly inhabit that world without thought. Now, instantly, he was held up against something infinitely beyond his world. And there, in the stark and contradictory contrast of a miracle happening in his boat, on his lake, with his net and his hands, he saw himself. Here, he was backlit.
Starkly backlit by God, his life was thrust into keen and crippling perspective. The blinding light revealed the thin veneers of his life so much so that he was exposed beyond his ability to comprehend the exposure, much less deal with it. The din of the activity faded as Simon was drawn down, face to face with his revealed self. The sea, the boats, the commotion of fellow fishermen . . . they all disappeared as he devolved deep into himself. Simon Peter was fraught with himself, finding himself grappling with the reality of his person as he had never seen it before, or been willing to see it.
He turned, stepped, and lunged to the front of the boat. Here Jesus had watched the miracle unfold; God incarnate enjoying the provision of the fish, the message in the provision, and lives about to be changed by the provision. Simon Peter dropped before Jesus, a proclamation of utter transparency leaping from his lips in stammering honesty. Starkly set against the activity around him he shouted, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV).
God had invaded the core of Peter’s being and he had been illuminated against it. Here he saw the real self. He acknowledged what has been exposed as far too much to comprehend, and far too big to allow him to recalibrate it all into something that made sense to him. He could not embrace it, so vast was the exposure. So, he had to get away from the light and get it away from him. Yet, he would ultimately find that entirely impossible. Soon the disciples would be named and his name would be the first called in a list of many names. It was no wonder as being backlit is often the precursor to being called.
My World Defining Me
And so I am lulled into the ebb and flow of my life, into the circumstances that swirl in variant pools around me; the eddies and rippling waters that reflect back to me more of what they are than who I really am. And I blindly accept those reflections as me, allowing myself to become impoverished in the surrender of acceptance. It is when God steps into the middle of my world that what I took for God I find not to be God or of God. It is when He seats himself dead center, squarely at ground zero that I am inoperably exposed. It is here that something vastly superior is held up against who I have defined myself to be and what I have settled for.
Too often my own light is borrowed, reflected off of variant events around me much like the moon borrowing its light from the sun and reflecting back what does not belong to itself. My life is backlit by weak imitations that reflect things that are not their own, backlighting my life by anemic events that reflect a light so washed out that the landscape of my life is hardly perceptible. This I eventually take for light with the eyes of my soul having become so unaccustomed to real light that its absence is no longer comprehended. I then settle and sell out to vagueness as this kind of light provides little more than that. All the while the profound challenges and wild passions lay a silent captive to the deep shadows that such a light casts; shadows that never surrender their contents to whatever light I bring to them until my life is backlit and the shadows are forced to surrender.
The Hopeful Shock
The shock of being backlit by Jesus rests in the instantaneous awareness that it brings. The sudden illumination of everything makes everything vividly stark and painfully clear. Such is the penetrating nature of this light that the light itself brazenly outlines and defines every sordid aspect of who I am, leaving no room to ponder or stew over them myself. Neither does it give me room to manipulate what has been revealed because the clarity is so pure that it’s cognitively impenetrable and completely indefensible. Otherwise the moment would be robbed, becoming something less than wholly divine in the thievery.
To be backlit by Jesus is to fully see and fully comprehend all at once. All that is left for me to do is to embrace the truth vividly set before me, or squander the moment in futile attempts at denial. More times than I can explain I have rushed to the front of the boat, prostrated myself before Him and begged him leave because I am faced with the horror of myself.
At those times my putrid disgust with myself clearly bars my relationship with Him. Inevitably every time, He looks beyond what I cannot. He sees who I am verses what I have become, delineating the difference in vivid starkness so clear that I cannot stand before myself. He reminds me of His grace which makes my grotesqueness the raw material from which He weaves His glory. And then, bedeviled and helpless by what I see in myself He calls the authentic me to works beyond my comprehension when all I want is for Him to leave. And it is in the angst of desperately wanting to flee and break His hold on me that I am held against myself and am drawn kicking and screaming into phenomenal growth.
Making a Habit of the Light
And so I go fishing with Jesus every day. Fishing for men? Yes. But also that kind of fishing that repeatedly back lights my life against the majesty of God. It is placing myself in His presence while fighting every urge not to do so; readying me for the poignant realization that I am not what I presume to be and being with Jesus will highlight that every time. It is not His disappointments in me for His grace will always tempter that. It is my own disappointment in myself. I want to avoid Him because I want to avoid the pain of personal honesty. But I find an incongruent passion that causes me to leap into the boat because I know the joy of being honest before Jesus and what He does with that. I am constantly, repeatedly and forever changed.
Darren and a Plastic Fish
People continued to mill about me, but they had vanished in the midst of deep thought and emotional turmoil beset within me. I turned to Darren who was meandering off to some unknown destination; much like his life. I reached out and touched his shoulder. He stopped and staggered a bit as he turned to look at me, his body long worn beyond grace and dexterity of movement. Sparking eyes set deep in worn sockets met mine, shocking me into the realization that I did not have that sparkle. I paused tentatively. “Can I see your fish?” I stammered. Although a rare treasure, he instantly placed it in my hands without hesitation or forethought. He unabashedly shared the wealth of his life in a simple gesture, freely giving to a soul that needed what he had found; handing to me what he had grasped. I needed the authenticity of his faith and the deep conviction in whose light my own pathetic belief system shrank and ran sour.
Such treasures often come in simple packages, like Darren. Their simplicity is in their security, as few would look there. Few look there because few lend their eyes to simplicity because simplicity suggests vacancy and emptiness. Those who do look there find the opposite . . . they find treasure. They are not out to rob or pillage the treasure, but rather seek it as a precious gift that no one can hoard or hold individually. It is bigger than one individual and made to pass to and through all individuals, so it passes much more simply through simple people like Darren. It is to be savored, drawn fully into oneself and then left to enrich the next passerby. Hidden away in the Darren’s of the world God has deposited His light, set to explode into any life that is so daring and so desperate as to engage the light in simple places.
I held his plastic fish, turning it this way and that, drawing down into its plastic and paint as had Darren, trying to draw out of it what he had. “I’m going to hang it in my house,” he blurted. “I don’t have anything on one wall. It’s all white. Just white, that’s all. And I’m going to hang it right in the middle,” he said. A barren wall; like his life. His faith was hung right in the middle of it. And I thought, how totally appropriate and how absolutely wonderful.
I handed the plastic fish back to him. “I’m going to go home right now and hang it up!” he said with electric excitement. As he turned to shuffle away, I called after him and said, “Thanks Darren.” There was no response. He hadn’t heard me. He was engulfed in the symbol of his faith, a captive to his mad love affair with his God and his fish. Other people still mingled about me, but I no longer desired what they offered. As Darren stepped into the passenger seat of a waiting car I realized that I wanted what he had. I wanted a plastic fish. I wanted a vibrant faith. I wanted to be consumed with God as was this disheveled man; to have all of that hanging in the center of my life. And he had backlit my life in such a way to show me the terrible deficits that I had.
I can still see that fish in my mind. It is clear and vivid reminder of my faith, of following Jesus; of that to which he calls me. Being reminded of that by an event that backlit my life so that I could see my life. And so, Darren, if some day you are to read this, I simply want to say what you didn’t hear that day . . . “thank you!”
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