Fishing with Jesus

I’ve been struggling with stress recently, and I’m learning a lot in the process.

For the last two months I’ve had a lot more responsibility at work than I ever have before. I’m getting stretched and challenged and I’m learning to work more efficiently, all of which is good, but in response I stupidly let work bleed into time that was meant to be for rest and recreation. Panicked thoughts began to seep into the back of my mind: Too much to do! Not enough time! I began waking up in the small hours and taking ages to get back to sleep. By three weeks ago I was feeling physically shaky and even more forgetful than usual, then after one evening meeting in which I repeatedly called someone Ed who definitely isn’t called Ed I recognised I was exhausted and needed to STOP. I took the next day off sick. My head felt so weird and spaced out I thought I was coming down with a cold, but I think it was literally just stress.

I took it very, very easy over the next few days and gave myself plenty of time to pray. One morning when I was praying this picture floated into my mind.

I’m going fishing with Jesus. We’re in a small boat with an outboard motor. Jesus looks like an old, weathered fisherman, the silent inscrutable type, eyes on the horizon as he steers the boat (putt putt putt) across the lake. It’s a nice day. At some point we begin to fish. The pace is slow, methodical, calm. We deal with one fish at a time. I know that before it gets dark, we’ll go back to shore.

The overall sense of this picture was of working at a calm, steady pace. My own approach to ‘fishing’ had been to jump out of the boat and swim around frantically trying to harpoon six different fish at once – and to carry that on late into the evening. But here is Jesus saying, “Go at my pace. Don’t rush ahead. Don’t try to get all the fish. Just do what you can, one fish at a time, and let the other ones go.”

This has made so much sense to me that most of the last week I had zero stress. If three tasks presented themselves at once I’d recall the picture of the boat putt-putting over the lake, of Jesus as the calm fisherman, and of dealing with one fish at a time, letting the other fish go. I still feel tired and my sleep isn’t brilliant – I reckon the stress could rear its head again if I’m not careful – but I’ve definitely learnt something.

That has got me thinking about time and stress and how we deal with both. I’m beginning to realise that the Bible is stuffed full of teaching on this exact subject. Also, Celtic Christian spirituality offers a helpful framework for working with the time God has given us, rather than fighting against it.

Jesus’ teaching

God is funny. I’ve been trying to familiarise my pagan teenagers with Jesus’ words, by turning them into nice visual quotes and spamming them on Discord (the only language they understand, I reasoned). In fact, I suspect they haven’t looked at a single one, but the process has inadvertently made me meditate on them – just when I needed these words the most.

Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
Do not worry about tomorrow. Today has enough trouble of its own.
Consider the birds of the air. They don’t sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Aren’t you much more valuable than they are?
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

That last one, the idea of animals yoked together to pull something, reminds me of my fishing picture. Jesus isn’t telling us not to bother doing any work. He’s saying there is a way to work – alongside him – that isn’t stressful: “Go at my pace. Don’t rush ahead. Don’t take on too much. The weight I’m asking you to pull isn’t heavy. I’m right here by your side, pulling as well.”

What’s implicit in Jesus’ teaching is trust. We have to believe that our heavenly father understands what we need and values us enough to give it to us. That does not come naturally to us humans. We think we’re on our own. We can’t trust an invisible deity to look after us, so we take that task on ourselves.

I think the Bible’s teaching about the sabbath is designed to change that mentality. It shows us that we are designed to work, yes, but the ultimate responsibility for making stuff happen and the world go round is God’s. Taking a sabbath rest, even at busy times like harvest, is an act of faith. We put in six days, but we trust God that can manage without us long enough to rest on the seventh.

Of course, being human, we took the teaching about resting on the sabbath and turned it into a set of rules more stressful than working a seven-day week. No working! No anything that looks even a little bit like working! No joy or fun!* So Jesus had to explain, “The sabbath is made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath” and modelled what that meant by healing people on it. (This upset the Sabbath Police so much, according to Mark’s gospel, it was the last straw that led to them plotting his death. Just wow.)

Embracing time the Celtic way

I could have avoided most of this stress in the first place if I’d paid attention to the commitment I made in joining the Community of Aidan and Hilda less than a year ago. One of the community’s ten principles, which each member writes into their own ‘way of life‘, is to maintain a ‘rhythm of prayer, work and rest’. In my way of life, as well as committing to a daily pattern of prayer, I’d committed to not letting my working hours overrun, and doing things that feed my soul as often as possible – like two hours of gardening a week, meeting a friend once a month, getting some kind of cultural fix once every two months. I had no idea how necessary that commitment was or how thoroughly it would be tested.

The Community of Aidan and Hilda has put me back in touch with the passage of time. Following their suggested daily pattern, I stop and pray, however briefly, first thing in the morning, at noon, at the end of the working day and at night. That has made me more aware of the different times of day. Then there’s different times of year. We’ve just had Imbolc, the Celtic word for the start of spring on 1 February (much cheerier than waiting for the 1 March, frankly) when you notice the days getting longer, being halfway between midwinter and the spring solstice. I’m noticing these change in seasons much more keenly now despite being an indoorsy Londoner, with no crops to plant or seas to navigate, and relishing the meaning each one carries. Even winter, seen as a time of rest and waiting for the light to return, holds significance for me now. And, having completely ignored the moon for the first fifty years of my life, I’m now constantly aware of what phase we’re in (full moon round about now). I enjoy this connection with nature and with an ancient way of life: I can see the passage of time marked in the heavens just like my ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago, including the Jewish people, who held new moon festivals in ancient times and still do.

Time is for humans

It seems then that this way of observing time passing wasn’t something the Celtic Christians made up, but is deeply rooted in the Bible’s teaching, with its rhythm of festivals linked to the time of year. I think that’s why Celtic Christian spirituality resonates so much for so many people – it’s based on how God designed us as humans.

And this is the thing: time is meant to work for us, and with us. Time is made for humans, not humans for time. We have been given a beautiful rhythm to carry us through the day, the week, the month, the seasons. Yet we constantly fight it. We turn it into a rod for our own backs. We try to fit more hours into the day than actually exist. We work when we’re supposed to rest, and wonder why we are too exhausted to get anything done. We give time to things and tasks, not people and love, and wonder why our relationships are a source of stress. We turn things like Christmas – or Sunday meetings in our Evangelical churches – into an exhausting circus, instead of a time of simple connection with family and God.

So I reckon that Jesus’ way of fishing, while it seems slow, isn’t unproductive. I feel that if I choose my tasks mindfully, trying to discern his Spirit as I do so, I’ll pick the ones that actually matter, and focus less on the ones that look important but are really a waste of time. If I’m working with God, he’ll make my work more fruitful than I could ever do by myself – leaving the fishing analogy aside for a moment, it’s the farmer who sows the seed but it’s God who makes it grow. The other day I was contemplating my fishing picture again, and imagined that a shoal of fish might even jump into my boat of its own accord while I was taking a nap. It made me laugh out loud.

A prayer to embrace time

Lord, thank you that you invented time. Thank you for the hours, the days, the months, seasons, the years – for night as well as day, winter as well as spring. Thank you that you made these things for us, to guide us and bless us, not to stress us out.

Lord, I’ve got a lot to learn – please help me today. Teach me to go at your pace. Help me sense the yoke across my neck, the gentle, easy yoke that is so easy to forget and slip away from. Remind me not to gallop ahead and run myself ragged.

Today I choose to walk in step with you. I will work when you work, stop when you stop. I will do one task at a time – help me tune into your wisdom as I choose. I acknowledge that I can’t do all the tasks. I will have to let some of them go. I trust you with them Lord.

Today I choose to balance work with rest. I will do what work I can today, and then I will stop. I won’t think ahead to tomorrow. And one day a week I will leave the bulk of my work in your hands. I’ll focus on resting and being with the people I love and/or doing the things that restore my soul.

Thank you Lord. Amen.

*To demonstrate that we have learnt nothing since Jesus said this two millenia ago, as a boy in Northern Ireland my father used to play with the Presbyterian minister’s daughter in her garden after Sunday lunch. Their favourite game was cricket. But if the minister ever caught them playing, they explained they were reenacting the crossing of the Red Sea (which worked beautifully on him). But why would anyone ban cricket on a Sunday? How is that not the perfect way to relax and recharge? This minister had completely missed Jesus’ point. (I find cricket so boring I would have nodded off watching it, but that may be a separate issue.)