- Admin
- May 5
- 2 min read
Updated: May 9
Sunday May 04, 2025
See
We prefer familiar failures to uncertain beginnings. After crushing disappointment, these fishermen retreat to what they know—empty nets and midnight waters—rather than navigating the unmapped territory of resurrection. How readily we too abandon possibility for the comfort of old identities, returning to practiced inadequacies when transformation seems too disorienting.
Recognition arrives not in spectacular revelation but through ordinary abundance. The shoreline breakfast—fish caught through borrowed wisdom, bread from unseen sources—reveals how sustenance often appears where we've repeatedly cast empty nets. Our blindness to divine presence stems not from absence but from our stubborn insistence on discovering it in expected forms.
Love's interrogation strips away our pretensions. Three questions penetrate Peter's self-assured loyalty, each peeling back layers of assumed devotion until raw vulnerability remains. True calling emerges not from capability but from acknowledged weakness; leadership authority flows precisely from the wounds we'd rather conceal. Our capacity to nurture others expands in proportion to our willingness to admit our need for nurturing.
Listen
Reflect
(John 21:1-19)
Reflect on where you've retreated to familiar patterns after disappointment. What comfortable failures do you return to when new possibilities seem too uncertain? When have your empty nets become preferable to the risk of casting them differently?
Consider moments when abundance arrived unexpectedly in your life. How might familiar landscapes—relationships, work, daily routines—contain unrecognized presence waiting to be discovered? Where have you been looking right past what you need most?
Examine your reluctance to acknowledge vulnerability. How might your wounds and failures—the very places where you feel inadequate—become sources of connection rather than shame? What might happen if you allowed these tender spots to become points of genuine leadership?
Pray
Restorer of broken trust, you meet us in our retreat to old patterns. Transform our unsuccessful night fishing into dawn revelations. Feed us when we cannot feed ourselves. Make our wounds sources of empathy rather than shame. Lead us from familiar failures toward the courage to follow even when the path leads where we'd rather not go.
