Going out into the deep. Wow! That theme always comes up to my mind, at least when I think of physical therapy or think of going to get training, physical training. Sometimes when you feel like you don’t have enough energy to get through the exercise or get through that moment, somehow you get that extra strength to go out into the deep.

That’s what the lesson was in today’s fishing exposition there. Sometimes we face moments when we’re asked to go out that extra mile or further with patient endurance in our lives. Other times we have to seek gifts that we’re convinced we don’t have. Yet it’s in these moments of trusting in God’s grace that God can fill our nets. He can fill what’s empty, what appears to be empty, with hope.

The Lord fills us and he also sends us out. The disciples experienced this lesson, of course, from that classroom of the seashore, and Peter obeys, listening to Jesus, and he goes out and casts that net again. St. Paul, too, follows in faith after his own experience of hardship. He refers to himself as the least of all the apostles. But through God’s grace, I am what I am, he says. He taps into something that he’s been given, and that’s the knowledge, the knowledge that he needs that equips him to do what God wants him to do to evangelize.

Even the prophet Isaiah said, “Who am I? I’m a man of unclean lips.” But yet God touched his lips, touched his heart, enabled him then to say, “Here I am. Send me,” with courage. To recognize the hand of the Lord of God is upon him, so much so that he was able to place himself at the service of others.

Here am I. Send me. Going out into the deep take place in us as we open ourselves to God through conversion, repentance, and prayer, and as we’re filled with peace and reassurance that God is with us.