Gone Fishing

The Church Needs Us All
They’re not expecting to see him there. But John is a sensitive soul, John who is intuitive, John who is affectionate. John recognizes Jesus, “It is the Lord.” And Peter? Peter’s different from John. Peter’s just gung-ho. Peter’s out of the boat swimming to shore before John can take another breath. “It is the Lord,” John says, and in he goes, Peter. And then John gets out and goes along with him. And the others are all left in the boat. You know, the Christian community, the Christian church is made up of all kinds of people. Oh, there’s people like John, very perceptive, very intuitive, very empathetic, sympathetic. There’s Peter. Peter is just a dynamo of action. And then there’s the others. The ones who stay in the boat, because if they get out of the boat, they’ll lose the catch. If they don’t stay, all these fish that they have just caught are going to get away. So they stay in the boat, while the other two are running to Jesus, they stay in the boat and manage the weight and, slowly but surely, they get the boat to the shore where Jesus stands. You see, there’s a place for everybody in the body of Christ. There’s a place for all kinds and all types of people in the body of Christ. And most of us, most of us, for all of our lives just keep keeping on. We’ll do what we can. And God will use what we can do. In the bigger picture, God will use what we can do. We need the intuitive, spiritually minded John. We need the go-getting high powered people. But the church would not survive without the rest of us, looking after the nets, tending to the fish, and bringing them to Jesus.