You’ve been out all night, all week, all month. It goes the same for all of us. We cast our buckets to the creative wells of inspiration tucked deep in the heart and the mind and once, and we pull. We pull up a catch of emotions and thoughts all tangled together and rearrange them on a page in something called story.
Some days it’s light work, and though we’re working alone, the encouragement and prayers of others seems to grow hands and make our job easy. We pull and pull and our buckets overflow.
Other days it’s hard work, and our two little arms hardly seem strong enough to pull up a bucket that just reveals itself to be empty.
It seems like a game of chance. Yes, there are strategies. Write consistently. Plot the scenes. Re-inspire yourself. Keep a schedule. Pray for help. Yet every day is a new day when you sit down to spill your heart out, and overnight all those cells in your body seemed to have rearranged themselves; your heart cannot come out the same way twice.
We’ve been told that there will be dry seasons and seasons so bursting with inspiration that it will overflow and we will never be able to get enough words out. Some days we will be so eager to put our hands to the rope, to dip down the bucket, cast our nets. Other days we will sit and say, “I have toiled all night and taken nothing.”
There is something so disheartening about going back to a story day after day and finding nothing but an empty mind and words so hard they bruise your mind when they come out.
Perhaps Peter’s “all night” was meant to mean days and days. Days without fish. And here comes this random carpenter (what does he know about fishing, anyway?) who says, “put out into the deep.”
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Put out into the deep.
What is the deep? How far is the deep? When, after months of toiling with no catching of inspiration or stories, no more than a fish quickly gleaming beneath the water and out of sight—we finally settle down and assume things aren’t going to happen. Then Jesus shows up. Where was he earlier? He doesn’t say. He just tells us to set out into the deep—isn’t it nearly laughable? Haven’t we been out in the deep, scraping at the bottom of our well of inspiration for days on end? What logic is there in doing that again?
Yet we are desperate. We are so desperate that we tell this carpenter “at your word I will let down the nets.” Expecting to find nothing, probably halfheartedly reaching down into the dry pit of inspiration.
We probably find nothing. Maybe I misinterpret this gospel story, but I think Peter had to go out pretty far. Way far. Probably farther than he wanted to go with his weary body and strained eyes, on and on.
I don’t think that, when we decide to go something with God, it just works. Yes, sometimes things are easy. Sometimes the fish are waiting in the shallows. But sometimes not. Sometimes we must leave the familiar, the easy, the things we’ve always done to follow the advice of a carpenter (what does he know about writing, anyway?) to make out into the deep where the inspiration is.
What does that mean for any of us? Putting out into the deep is not a one time deal. It’s a constant invitation. I think it’s a constant invitation to let go of what we think we know is right and follow the urging (through God’s Word and what we hear in the silence) toward a life that is ever going deeper and deeper into his love.
Peter had just finished cleaning his nets. He was done. God was not. I’m sure after many sessions of writing, a lot of us are “done” with our stories. Nope. We’re not going to work on them anymore. We’re over with them.
Then God gets in our boat, and since it’s, well, our boat, we should probably get back in it with him, right?
I think we do that with the expectation that he’s automatically going to revolutionize our current stories and writing processes. And maybe he will. Maybe he’ll make a few great tweaks and give us a thumbs up. Shallow water is good, bud, just a bit over to the right!
Or he’ll say “put out into the deep.” Go away from the familiar, try something entirely new, here’s something that’s going to transform your life, if you only follow it.
Maybe he changes our stories. Maybe he wrecks them entirely. Maybe he tells us to take a break and go out into the world because hey, your smile can inspire the world just as much as a heartfelt story can. We might be shaking our heads and keep glancing at him and wondering who this mad carpenter is, but we still need to go if we ever want that catch.
Get in the boat. Set out into the deep. Let him revolutionize your stories (and your life)
(Originally published March 3, 2019, on audreycaylin.com)