The nets go down one more time, and this time Luke 5:6 tells us something entirely different happened. “And when they had done this, they caught a great number of fish, and their net was breaking.” So great was the catch that Simon had to signal his partners in the other boat, James and John, to come help pull it in.

Picture the scene for a moment. Men already exhausted from an entire wasted night, now burning through every last bit of remaining energy to save a catch and a net that couldn’t hold what it had suddenly been given. James and John row out to help, and Verse 7 tells us both boats began filling up so heavily that they started to sink right there in the deep water. Two boats, sinking under the weight of the very thing that had been completely absent from that lake just hours earlier.

Here’s what’s worth catching before this story moves any further. This was never really about the fish. The fish are visible proof of something much larger happening underneath the surface of the story. God didn’t simply meet Simon’s reluctant, exhausted “nevertheless” obedience. He overwhelmed it.

Simon never asked for an abundant catch. He never asked for a catch at all. He didn’t even ask to believe it would work. He simply agreed to try one more time because Jesus told him to, and God responded by giving him more than his own boat, and his partner’s boat combined, could physically hold.

Some of us have been living inside our own version of “we toiled all night and caught nothing” for a long time now. Marriage. Family. Work. A prayer that seems to bounce off the ceiling without ever landing. A habit fought and lost to more times than can be counted. And there’s every good reason in the world to say, I already tried this, it didn’t work.

Simon’s word is still worth holding onto in exactly that moment. Nevertheless. You don’t need to feel confident before you obey. You just need to let the net down one more time, simply because He said so, and let God worry about what comes up in it. The size of what happened in those two sinking boats had nothing to do with how much faith Simon felt walking into it. It had everything to do with who told him to try again.

It’s worth noticing, too, that Simon couldn’t have pulled this catch in alone. He needed James and John, needed hands he hadn’t planned on needing that morning, to keep the whole thing from being lost overboard. Sometimes obedience doesn’t just stretch what we thought we could carry. It pulls other people into the boat with us who end up just as changed by the moment as we are. James and John rowed out expecting to help a friend save a catch. They ended up watching something that reshaped the rest of their own lives too, and neither of them had asked for that when they climbed into the water that morning.