In the night you have a dream. As the backdrop of the dream clarifies into picture from the fog of your sleep, you find that you stand at the foot of a great pond looking down at your feet. Only a foot of the water’s edge is within your span of view and other than what you can see, your senses are super-alert, aware, and perceptive. You can feel the soft country breeze, the moist air moving around your body as it meanders through the expanse beyond you. The soil under your toes is crunchy and giving and as you stand there, you have the sensation of slowly sinking into its blessed richness. You can hear the buzz of water bugs, bees, and grasshoppers as they move about beyond you, outside of your span of vision. Occasionally one insect or another moves across your feet. But you don’t move. You can smell the reeds you can’t see and the soft, pungent odour of manure accompanying the sound of cows in the distance. Harmony. Peace. Life.
And the air around you – the air itself is buzzing with life. Alive with it, so you can taste it, and its presence in your dream makes you wonder if you really are asleep – for how could something be this real? When you try to move to investigate this world, you discover a lack of movement in any and every direction, as if the body you thought you indwelt was merely a camera, and you were not at the controls. You stare at the foot of water within your span of vision and begin to contemplate the pond.
Water so still, a sheet of glass, as serene and peaceful as the world it occupies. Deep too. Clear as ever a pond could be – yet the bottom fades out of view in shades of depth and reflection. What is this? Where are you?
As you stare, a ripple, a miniscule wave moves across your view and laps gently against your toes. And then another. And another. Gradually, the waves spread farther apart, lower, and less, until they are gone completely. And you begin to wonder: Something happened out there, in the middle of this pond that I can’t see. Something dropped into the water, farther out so I could not hear, beyond the reach of my senses trapped within this frozen body. A chain reaction took place that made me aware of its presence: Water displacement. An object hit the water, caused a wave that pushed another and another, until they came all the way – all the way to your feet.
The realization comes slowly that your dream is a metaphor: The grass, the country sounds and smells - is your life - the cumulative sum of your experience, the world in which you know. And the pond in front of you – it is history, deep and mysterious, still and immovable as you gaze upon it. A wave comes across its surface. A message has come to you. A story has moved along history, creating experience, affecting people everywhere and pushing towards you. You can’t see the original event. You have heard, you have read, and the results of that event that happened so far out in the pond of history that you can’t directly access it, comes to you as concentric circles in displaced water upon a pond. Testimonies, stories, witnesses, songs, poems, organizations, institutions - you know something happened out there, something that caused this and as you study the shape and the texture of what you can see in front of you, a picture begins to emerge of what really happened back then. What does it mean for you, where you stand? What happened back there and who really is this Person that everyone talks about? What does he have to do with me?
And the air around you – the air itself is buzzing with life. Alive with it, so you can taste it, and its presence in your dream makes you wonder if you really are asleep – for how could something be this real? When you try to move to investigate this world, you discover a lack of movement in any and every direction, as if the body you thought you indwelt was merely a camera, and you were not at the controls. You stare at the foot of water within your span of vision and begin to contemplate the pond.
Water so still, a sheet of glass, as serene and peaceful as the world it occupies. Deep too. Clear as ever a pond could be – yet the bottom fades out of view in shades of depth and reflection. What is this? Where are you?
As you stare, a ripple, a miniscule wave moves across your view and laps gently against your toes. And then another. And another. Gradually, the waves spread farther apart, lower, and less, until they are gone completely. And you begin to wonder: Something happened out there, in the middle of this pond that I can’t see. Something dropped into the water, farther out so I could not hear, beyond the reach of my senses trapped within this frozen body. A chain reaction took place that made me aware of its presence: Water displacement. An object hit the water, caused a wave that pushed another and another, until they came all the way – all the way to your feet.
The realization comes slowly that your dream is a metaphor: The grass, the country sounds and smells - is your life - the cumulative sum of your experience, the world in which you know. And the pond in front of you – it is history, deep and mysterious, still and immovable as you gaze upon it. A wave comes across its surface. A message has come to you. A story has moved along history, creating experience, affecting people everywhere and pushing towards you. You can’t see the original event. You have heard, you have read, and the results of that event that happened so far out in the pond of history that you can’t directly access it, comes to you as concentric circles in displaced water upon a pond. Testimonies, stories, witnesses, songs, poems, organizations, institutions - you know something happened out there, something that caused this and as you study the shape and the texture of what you can see in front of you, a picture begins to emerge of what really happened back then. What does it mean for you, where you stand? What happened back there and who really is this Person that everyone talks about? What does he have to do with me?
Peter looks at the fish net in his hands in the first century, AD, and moves his eyes from it to the man standing out on the beach, back and forth, over and over. What did he just say to me? Follow me? Just like that? Who is this guy, anyway? What in the world is it going to take for me to drop this net and do what he says . . . .
One day you heard a person say, "follow me." And you may or may not have said yes. Do you really know what you have gotten into? Did saying yes change anything for you? Because if you did drop the net and follow him, did everything change?
At the end of the story Peter is again in a boat with a fish net, and on the shore is the same Person, calling him. This time he does drop the net, leaves everythng, and follows the one he now really knows: "We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you of the power and the coming . . . " -- the Apostle Peter.
