The Fourth Notebook Has The Same First Line

She buys the notebooks at the grocery store, the ones with the marbled covers, because they are eighty-nine cents and they lie flat.

There are four of them now. The first one is in the drawer under the phone books. The second is in her bag. The third one she is not sure about, and the fourth is open on the kitchen table right now with the pen laid in the crease.

All four of them start the same way. Same list, four times, three years apart at the ends of it. Five lines. Short ones.

The handwriting gets better each time. That is a real thing she has noticed and does not like noticing. The fourth one is genuinely lovely, the letters even, the margins straight, the way her mother wrote.

Line one has never been done.

Not once, in three years. She has rewritten it, reworded it twice, once split it into two smaller lines and then put it back together because splitting it felt like cheating.

She has thought about line one at the sink. She has thought about it in the car park at the feed store. She has told the Lord about it in her chair by the window, in the winter dark, with her hands folded and everything in her honest.

And then she buys a new notebook.

Not on purpose. She never once said, I am going to copy the list again instead of doing it. It happens the way the kitchen gets tidied instead of the letter getting written.

She is not lazy. This is a woman who put up forty quarts of tomatoes in one August week and canned them at eleven at night after a full day.

She just has never been told that line one was allowed to be small. Every time she looks at it, she sees the whole of it, all at once, the entire finished thing, and she reaches for the pen instead, because the pen she can do.

And you have a list somewhere too. It might be in your head instead of a notebook. But you could recite line one right now, without looking.

He had every reason to argue and he let the net down anyway

There is a morning on a lake in Luke where a professional fisherman is cleaning his nets after a night that produced nothing, and a carpenter's son from the hill country tells him to put out into the deep and let the nets down.

Understand who is being told what. Simon has fished that water his whole life. He knows what the lake does at that hour. He has just spent an entire night proving the point, and he is tired, and the nets are half clean, which anybody who has ever cleaned anything knows is the worst moment to be interrupted.

And listen to what he says.

And Simon answered, "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets."Luke 5:5

He does not pretend to agree. He says the objection out loud. We worked all night. There is nothing out there. And then he hangs the whole thing on four words that have nothing to do with fishing at all.

At your word.

You are not required to feel convinced before you move, and you never were, because the thing being asked of you was never your agreement. It is written that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Romans 10:17), which puts the origin of the whole business outside you where it has always been, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a word across that gap and sets it down in a woman at her kitchen table.

Now notice what Simon did not do.

He did not go back to shore and prepare. He did not schedule the deep water for after the nets were properly finished. He did not ask for the conditions to change first, and the conditions did not change: it was still the wrong hour on the same lake with the same tired arms.

He let one net down, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, on a word.

You have already been given the one thing this depends on, and it is not a feeling and not a season and not a better notebook, it is a word, and you have had it for three years. Scripture says His word is a lamp to the feet (Psalm 119:105), which is a small light aimed low, enough for the next step and not the whole road, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps that lamp lit in a person long after they have stopped expecting Him to.

Here is the part that matters most for a woman with four notebooks, and it is tender.

The copying was never rebellion. Nobody rewrites a list four times in beautiful handwriting because they are running from God. They do it because they are looking at the whole thing at once and cannot find a place to put their hand on it, and a pen is a genuine comfort, and reaching for one is a small human ache and not a sin.

You are not being scolded here, and the three years are not being counted against you, because the account you are in is not that kind of account. It is written that His mercies are new every morning and His faithfulness is great (Lamentations 3:22-23), and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a tally who is standing beside your chair in the winter dark, and He has been there for all four notebooks.

And then the size of it.

Line one does not have to be done whole. Nothing anywhere says it does. What the lake account gives us is a single net, let down once, by a man who thought it was pointless, and the whole of the story turns on that one net.

You have permission for the smallest honest piece of it, and that piece is not a lesser version of obeying, it is obeying. Scripture says whoever is faithful in very little is faithful also in much (Luke 16:10), and the Spirit who wrote that line is not standing over your table with a red pen, waiting for the version of line one that would impress somebody.