They Left the Boats Right There on the Sand

He can see the turn. That is not the problem and it has not been the problem for about a year.

The problem is the phone. He scrolled it one night, all the way down, slowly, doing a kind of audit, and by the bottom he had four names that would survive it.

Four. Out of a lot.

And they are not bad people, most of them. Some of them are the reason he got through a hard stretch in his twenties. Two of them would give him anything he asked for tonight, no questions. That is not nothing, and it is not something a person walks away from lightly.

So the arithmetic he keeps running is this. On one side, a thing he knows he has to put down. On the other side, every single person who knows what he was like at nineteen and still picks up.

And nobody has ever explained to him how a man is supposed to do the first without paying the second.

Four men walked away from a working business

There is a scene by a lake that people read too fast, because they are used to it.

Jesus tells some fishermen to put the nets out again after a night that caught nothing. They do it, and the catch nearly sinks two boats.

Then this happens.

And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed him. (Luke 5:11, King James Version)

Read the order of those two things.

The boats are full. The nets are breaking. This is the best morning of business any of them has had, possibly ever.

And that is the moment they walk. They do not leave a failing operation. They leave a working one, on its best day, sitting on the sand.

You are not being asked to walk away from something worthless. Luke 5 puts the record catch immediately before the leaving, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old detail about timing land on somebody doing arithmetic with a phone.

The tax collector threw a party for the people he was leaving

Two paragraphs later in the same chapter there is a man in a completely different situation, and what he does is the part nobody expects.

Levi is a tax collector. His whole network is other tax collectors and the people who deal with them. If he turns, that is the room he loses.

And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them. (Luke 5:29)

He throws a party.

He does not disappear on them. He does not send a message and go quiet. He gets everybody he knows in one room and puts Jesus in the middle of it.

That is not the shape most people assume repentance takes. Levi did not delete his contacts. He introduced them.

You are not required to disappear on people in order to turn. Luke 5 has him hosting the exact crowd he was leaving, and it is His Spirit who makes an old dinner party feel like an option nobody mentioned.

Jesus put a number on what comes back

When Peter says out loud that they have left everything, Jesus does not tell him to stop counting. He answers the count.

Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions. (Mark 10:29-30)

Now in this time. Not later, and not somewhere else.

He lists a household coming back. And He does not tidy the sentence up at the end either. With persecutions is in there, in the same breath as the promise, and He did not have to include it.

That is a man being honest about both sides of the ledger at once.

You are given a count that comes back in this life and not somewhere else. Mark 10 says now in this time and keeps the hard clause in, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a promise with a cost attached feel more trustworthy than one without.

He told people to price it before they started

There is a passage where Jesus does the opposite of what a recruiter does.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? (Luke 14:28)

Sit down first and count.

He is not warning people off. He is telling them to do the arithmetic before they start rather than discover it halfway through.

Which means the counting a man does at midnight with his phone open is not faithlessness. It is the exact thing He told people to do.

You are doing the thing He instructed rather than failing a test. Luke 14 says count the cost in as many words, and it is His Spirit who makes an honest tally stop feeling like an accusation.

And God is described as putting people somewhere

There is a short line in the Psalms about arrangements, and it is the answer to the four names.

God setteth the solitary in families. (Psalm 68:6)

Setteth. Somebody puts a person somewhere.

That is not a promise that nobody is lost. Mark 10 already said out loud that there is a cost and did not soften it.

It is a statement about who does the placing afterwards, and it is worth reading next to what Jesus said comes back, because the two are describing the same thing from different angles.

You are placed rather than left standing in an emptied room. Psalm 68 uses a deliberate verb and Mark 10 gives the count, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes those two hold when a phone is still mostly full of the old list.