The Nets Left Behind on Lake Victoria

In 2014, a young fisherman named David Ochieng worked the pre-dawn waters of Lake Victoria near Kisumu, Kenya. Fishing was all he knew — his father's trade, his grandfather's before that. The nets were his inheritance, his security, his identity.

Then a visiting pastor named Samuel invited David to join a small literacy program at the local church. "Come," Samuel said simply. "I will teach you to read, and you will teach others." David looked at his nets drying in the morning sun. He looked at Samuel. And he walked away from the shore.

Within three years, David had trained over two hundred adults to read in surrounding villages. People who had lived in a kind of darkness — unable to read medicine labels, sign contracts, or study Scripture for themselves — suddenly saw light flooding into every corner of their lives. David often said he traded one kind of net for another.

When Jesus walked along the Sea of Galilee and called Peter and Andrew away from their fishing nets, He was not asking them to abandon honest work. He was inviting them into something so much larger that the old nets would feel small by comparison. "Follow Me," He said, "and I will make you fishers of men." The Almighty does not waste what we leave behind. He transforms it. Every skill, every callous, every early morning on the water — He redeems it all for a catch we never could have imagined.