Simon Peter said to them, "I am going fishing." They said to him, "We will go with you." — John 21:3

The moments in scripture that pull me in hardest are rarely the miraculous or heroic ones. They are the mundane ones, the ones that look like nothing. A few men decide to go fishing. That is where most of life actually happens — in the waiting room, the tedious task, the house that needs cleaning, the yard that needs working, the invoice that needs reconciling. Christ had died. Christ had risen. And Peter, having seen both, goes back to work. He needs the money. The fish will not catch themselves.

What strikes me about John 21 is that Jesus does not rebuke this. He does not appear on the shore to ask Peter how he could possibly be fishing after everything that had happened. Instead, he meets the men in the fishing. He stands on the beach at daybreak and asks them a perfectly ordinary question:

Children, have you caught anything?

It is a real question. Not rhetorical, not a test. The risen Lord wants to know whether their night of work produced anything. And after the miraculous catch, after they come ashore and find that he already has bread and fish on a charcoal fire, he tells them to bring some of the fish you have just caught. He did not need their catch. He had already provided. But he asks for it anyway, and puts it on the fire next to his own.

That detail has been working on me. The fish Peter hauled in from a long night of labor end up on the same plate as the fish Christ himself produced. There is no hierarchy on the breakfast table. Both feed the meal. Both matter.

The Pattern Runs Deeper

This is not a one-off. It is how Christ tends to operate.

At the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus could have created bread from nothing. Instead he takes the boy's five loaves and two fish and multiplies those. At Cana, the servants must first fill the jars with water. In the Eucharist itself — fruit of the vine and work of human hands. The pattern is consistent: Christ receives what people bring, and takes it up into something that feeds others.

Which pushes back hard against a certain pious instinct I have run into for most of my life — the instinct that says ordinary work is spiritually neutral at best, a distraction from the real thing. The John 21 picture suggests the opposite. The catch matters. Not because God needs it, but because he is the kind of God who asks for it, uses it, and sets it on the table.

The Gnostic Instinct in Evangelical Dress

I have written before about what I think of as evangelical gnosticism — the low-grade dualism that treats the material world as a holding pen we operate in while waiting for the real thing, with the "real thing" always defined as something that looks overtly religious. The word "gnostic" rarely gets used, but the instinct functions that way. Matter is suspect. Commerce is suspect. A career in business, engineering, law, trades, or finance is suspect — unless it can be justified as a platform for evangelism or be redirected into something that looks more like ministry.

I have watched this mindset steer people I love away from the very shape of the gifts they were given. Someone with a genuine knack for business, real acumen, real vision — talked out of it and pointed toward a profession deemed more "godly," usually healthcare or something adjacent to ministry. It almost never works. A knack for business is not a generic talent you can trade in for a healthcare aptitude. It is a particular way of seeing the world — reading people, spotting opportunity, managing risk, building something that did not exist before. Telling someone wired that way to go be a nurse is not elevating their vocation. It is asking them to bury the talent and hope the master will be pleased when he returns. The parable actually runs the other direction.

What goes unsaid in this redirection is a failure to trust the goodness of creation. If business acumen is a gift from God — and it is — then steering someone away from it is not piety. It is unbelief dressed as piety. It refuses to believe that God could be glorified in a well-run company, a fair contract, a product that actually works, employees treated with dignity, a market need met with excellence.

What the Scriptures Actually Show Us

The biblical picture of vocation is much earthier than the evangelical redirection allows. Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth. Priscilla and Aquila made tents, and Paul joined them at the bench. The patriarchs were livestock operators. David was a shepherd before he was a king, and wrote most of the psalms from inside both vocations. Joseph administered the grain supply of an empire. None of this is treated as something they endured until they could get to the real spiritual work. It was the work. God moved through it.

And then there is Jesus himself. Roughly thirty years as a carpenter. Three in public ministry. We have almost no evidence that the carpenter years were treated as a waiting period for the real thing to begin. The incarnation is the counter-argument to every dualism that wants to rescue us from embodiment and ordinary labor. God does not pull us out of the material. He enters it.

The Roman Roads

I keep coming back to the Roman roads. They were not built for the gospel. They were built for legions, tax collection, and imperial control — thoroughly secular aims, carried out by laborers who had no idea what was coming. And yet Paul walks them. The gospel moves across the Mediterranean on infrastructure built by pagans doing their jobs well.

You can extend the point. The Greek language Paul wrote in was shaped by centuries of philosophy, poetry, and commerce that had nothing to do with Israel's God. The papyrus, the copyists, the shipping lanes, the Pax Romana — all of it was taken up and used. None of it was ministry. All of it was indispensable.

The road builders were not working on an evangelism opportunity. They were building roads. That was enough. Christ took their stones and their sweat and moved his gospel along them.

The Question on the Shore

The question Jesus asks on the shore assumes the work was worth doing. Have you caught anything? That question cannot be asked by a God who regards ordinary labor as a distraction from the real thing. It can only be asked by a God who takes the catch seriously, who wants it on the fire, who sets it on the same plate as the fish he himself provided.

Most of us will never have a career that looks like ministry. Most of us will spend our lives fishing — running the business, closing the tickets, raising the kids, keeping the books, building the roads that someone else's gospel will one day travel. The evangelical instinct is to feel quietly guilty about this, to wish the work were more obviously holy, to try to bolt some ministry function onto the side of it so the hours count for something.

John 21 suggests the hours already count. The catch is already welcome. The risen Christ is already standing on the shore, interested in what you brought in.

Bring some of the fish you have just caught. He is making breakfast.