In today's gospel, we have the wonderful scene of that most amiable of all apostles, Saint Peter, who is out fishing all night, hard work, and he even says to the Lord, “We've engaged in hard work all night, but caught nothing. Yet at your word we will go out again.” Jesus tells him to go out after a night of failure of fishing – to go out again while he's in the boat with him, and hence he catches an enormous amount of fish where all the other boats have to come in and help him out.
You know, Saint Theresa of Lisieux once, very simply and succinctly said, “Everything is grace.” Yes, even the failures of the night's labor prepared Peter to recognize the great grace of the miracle that would be given to him in the morning. Yes. And we can apply that to the entirety of our lives after our days are lived and we come to the end of our earthly pilgrimage, a lot of those days will be marked with failure, but those failures taught us how to depend more on God and to obey His Word and His directives in our lives, because when we do so, it brings about only blessings, not curse.
My brothers and sisters, let us learn what it means to trust in the Lord when he asks something of us. The beautiful thing about our faith is that he doesn't ask us to know everything. He didn't ask Saint Peter to know everything about him, especially because he had most likely just met him, but he just asked him to trust. “Go out again. I'll come with you in the boat.”
Saint Ignatius once said “It is not knowing much, but realizing and relishing things interiorly that contents and satisfies the soul.” It was not so much knowing, but obeying God's will.
In our first reading from Saint Paul's letter to the Colossians, we hear him saying that, “Being filled with the knowledge of God's will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord so as to be fully pleasing in every good work, bearing fruit and growing in the knowledge of God…” is different than knowing everything about God because we're focusing on his will. What does he want from me? What is he asking of me? So it's more a matter of doing and trusting rather than knowing.
And so a lot of us get stuck on this point because, you know, if we can't explain exactly why it is God allows for certain things to happen in this life, we begin to question him. A lot of people would have said, why would God allow Peter to spend an entire night fishing, spending all that energy, all those resources, him and all the other men, and end up with nothing? Nothing all night?
Little do we know, sometimes the Lord allows things to happen in our lives so that we can trust in him all the more. So, my dear friends, do not lose hope. Trust in Jesus and you will never go wrong. Amen
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