As many of you know, I spent the greater portion of my summer abroad. England, Scotland, Germany, Spain, Portugal—I hopped around Europe thanks to the generosity of my university and the hospitality of old friends. While I was jet-setting, I never forgot about this little blog. True, I focused much of my energies into writing another project dedicated to the trip (you can read it at Home is Where the Luggage Is, if you'd like), but I also kept a smaller and more personal travel journal (these being only two of the many heavy books I misguidedly slogged around Europe), containing thoughts I one day hoped to share here. Below is the first of these—may it find you in sunshine and peace.
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Today, as I was walking along a rock pier near the port of Málaga, I saw a man and his son sitting along the side, fishing. I smiled, and remembered all of the trips I’d taken with my family to do the very same thing. The scene recalled a longstanding question of mine: why did Jesus call fishermen to ministry, and why did he refer to his disciples as fishers of men? I reflected on this while I watched this Spanish pescadero cast his line time and again, just inches from the edge of the rocks. It reminded me of an image I had seen earlier in the week while hiking the cliffs of the Bastei: a fully grown fish occupying a stretch of river perhaps only 20 feet in length, trapped between a small waterfall and an artificial dam. At the time, I had pitied the fish (which appeared to be related to the brook trout we have back home), and had thought about what different lives we were living—I, thousands of miles from home, meeting new people and seeing new places everyday, and it, whose entire existence would be in that exact spot, blocked off by rock and wood.
My focus drifted back to the fisherman, now in the process of adjusting the height of his bobber, when I had a curious idea. What if this whole world—this whole universe—were an ocean? Though some of us might travel all around it and others might choose to stay where they started, the confines would be exactly the same for everyone, and no one would see anything more than a tiny fraction of the grand whole. In such a world, it would take an outside force—a supernatural force, in the literal sense of the word—to pull us beyond the surface of the water. We could never initiate our own introduction to reality—we would only be able to take the line first presented to us, and be dragged into the sunlight.
Hmm. Now that sounds oddly familiar.
“"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6:44)
“We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
