Giving In, Not Giving Up

Letting Down the Nets

“Simon answered, ‘Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.”
Luke 5:5-7

When my father was going through recovery in 1984, I sent him a little book published the year before titled, The Night and Nothing, by Gale Webbe. Based on this quote from Luke, it was about the necessary passage into consciousness sometimes referred to as ‘the dark night of the soul.’ My dad was certainly going through such a passage. He had been to detox hundreds of times over the years in hopes of getting sober, but nothing had worked. His choices were to go through a lengthy rehab or die drunk, and in his mind it was a 50/50 proposition. Fortunately, he chose recovery and spent the final eleven years of his life clean and sober. During that time, he helped many other men and women achieve sobriety; some of them give him credit for saving their very lives.

There is another point worth making with regard to this passage from Luke, and that is Simon’s willingness to surrender—‘if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ Simon had no expectation of reward, and he was undoubtedly tired from toiling all night. The nets were heavy, and he’d just dragged them in and carefully stowed them in his boat. The last thing he wanted to do was cast them out again. But…he surrendered.

To most of us that word congers up defeat—I surrender, I quit, I give up, and you win. We recoil at the very notion. But another definition of surrender is to ‘allow’. To hold open the notion that anything is possible and that my expectation of what might happen represents only one potential outcome. Because Simon was willing to surrender, he opened up the possibility of the windfall of fish that he received. When my dad surrendered to rehabilitation, he created the possibility that he would spend the final decade of his life free from addiction to alcohol.

Sometimes we cling so tightly to our own idea of how things should be that we limit what is possible. We create disappointment where hope might thrive. Being able to live freely, without expectation of outcome, does not mean giving up. It means opening the door to everything that could be. It means allowing spirit to move through us, carrying the potential for surprise that is better than anything we might have imagined.

In the spirit,
Jane