Drop Your Nets: Mark 1:14-20

The news spread through Galilee like fire through dry grass: John had been arrested. Herod's soldiers had dragged the prophet from the wilderness in chains. The voice that shook the Jordan valley had been silenced.

But another voice rose to take its place.

Jesus walked the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, where the morning mist still clung to the water and fishing boats rocked gently at anchor. The air was thick with the smell of fish and salt and tar from mended nets. Simon and Andrew stood waist-deep in the shallows, their circular casting nets spreading like wings before splashing down, then dragging heavy through the water. Their arms ached. Their backs ached. They had done this every morning since boyhood, and their fathers before them.

Jesus stopped. "Follow me," he called across the water, "and I will make you fishers of men."

The net hung suspended in Simon's grip. One heartbeat. Two. Then it dropped from his fingers, sinking into the dark water, and he was wading toward shore. Andrew followed. They did not look back at the abandoned net. They did not calculate the cost.

Further down the beach, James and John sat in their boat with their father Zebedee, fingers working through tangled nets, separating the good cord from the frayed. Hired men sat nearby, waiting for orders. It was a successful operation—boats, employees, a family legacy.

Jesus called them.

They left their father sitting in the boat, his mouth still open mid-sentence, and walked away from everything they had ever known. The hired men stared. Zebedee stared. But James and John did not turn around.

Something about that voice made nets and boats and even fathers feel like shadows compared to what was being offered.