The Surgeon Who Handed Over the Scalpel

In 2019, Dr. Rana Awdish, a critical care physician at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, collapsed in the hallway of her own ICU. A ruptured tumor sent her into hemorrhagic shock, and suddenly the doctor who had spent fifteen years mastering medicine found herself on the wrong side of the gurney. She later wrote that the hardest moment wasn't the pain — it was surrendering control to her colleagues. Every instinct screamed to direct her own care, to call the shots, to trust her own expertise. But lying on that table, she had to release the scalpel she'd held her entire career and trust someone else's hands.

Simon Peter knew that feeling. He was the expert on that lake. He'd fished Gennesaret since boyhood, knew every current and cove, and the water had given him nothing all night. Then a carpenter told him to try again. Everything in Peter's professional pride said no. But something in the voice of Jesus made him lower those nets one more time.

What came up nearly sank two boats.

The Almighty rarely asks us to abandon our expertise — He asks us to submit it. Peter didn't stop being a fisherman that day. He became a greater one. The same hands that hauled in that miraculous catch would soon pull people from the deep.

God's abundance always begins where our self-sufficiency ends.