The Deep Water Off Montauk

Captain Dave Ryba had fished the waters off Montauk, Long Island for twenty-three years. He knew every sandbar, every current, every spot where striped bass gathered in October. So when a marine biologist from Stony Brook University stepped aboard his charter boat in 2019 and suggested he drop his lines two miles east of his usual grounds — over a deep trench Dave had always avoided — he nearly laughed. "Nothing's out there," he said. "I've fished this whole coast my entire life."

But something about the researcher's quiet confidence made Dave throttle forward anyway. Twenty minutes later, his rods bent double. He pulled in the largest haul of bluefin tuna he had ever seen — fish so heavy they strained his winches and flooded the deck.

Dave stood there, soaked and stunned, and said something fishermen almost never say: "I don't deserve this."

That is exactly where Simon Peter stood on the shore of Gennesaret. He was the professional. He knew those waters. He had fished all night and caught nothing. Yet when Jesus — a carpenter, not a fisherman — told him to push out into the deep and lower his nets, Peter obeyed. And the catch overwhelmed him so completely that his first response was not celebration but confession: "Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man."

The deepest waters of faith are always past the boundaries of our own expertise. Christ calls us there not to humiliate what we know, but to reveal what we have not yet imagined He can do.