When the Nets Come Up Empty

I have reminders set on my phone. Multiple ones. Scattered through my day like little anchors — small digital nudges that whisper it's in God's time, Michael. His timing, not yours. I put them there on purpose because I knew I would need them. I just didn't know how much.

I have been building. Hard. For months now. A pastoral AI tool for small church pastors who feel alone at 2am with a decision they can't talk to anyone about. A finance app my wife and I are building together. A web studio to help churches get online with dignity. Another studio running parallel to reach beyond the church walls. All of it born from real calling, real obedience, real love for God and for people. None of it from ego. I want to honor my wife. To build something that gives our family breathing room and margin and the kind of peace that isn't dependent on a paycheck. All of it born from a calling that was placed in my hands by someone I will never forget, in a moment I did not see coming.

Good desires. Real desires. Kingdom desires.

And yet. The nets keep coming up empty.

I have been casting wide. Trusting the process. Doing the work. Showing up in the evenings and on weekends after a full day vocational job, pouring hours into things I genuinely believe God put in my hands to build. And I have watched, month after month, as nothing has come to fruition the way I imagined it would. Not yet. Maybe not the way I planned at all.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from laziness but from faithfulness that hasn't been rewarded yet. You can't explain it to someone who hasn't felt it. It doesn't look dramatic from the outside. You just keep showing up. You keep casting. And you keep pulling up empty nets and telling yourself — and meaning it — that His mercies are new every morning.

I know that verse. I have leaned on that verse. But knowing a verse and being transformed by it are two very different things.

Tonight something shifted.

I wasn't in a church service. I wasn't on my knees in some dramatic moment of revelation. I was just still enough, finally, to hear what God has been trying to say through all the quiet and all the waiting.

Michael. You're building for me. But are you walking with me?

That stopped me cold.

Because the honest answer — the one I don't love admitting — is that somewhere in the building, in the striving, in the noble pursuit of good and Kingdom things, I had let the distance grow. Not from rebellion. Not from unconfessed sin. Just from busyness. From effort. From trying so hard to do the right things that I forgot to simply be with the One I was doing them for.

Our desires aren't always His desires. And even when they are — even when the calling is real and the work is good — He still wants us to want Him more than we want the fruit.

I am not writing this as someone who has it figured out. I am writing this as a man who woke up — or maybe was woken up — to the realization that the most important thing on my entire list of important things is the one I had been squeezing into the margins.

My relationship with Jesus. Not my theology. Not my obedience. Not my ministry. My friendship with Him.

I want Jesus to be my best friend again. Not a concept I build around. Not a mission statement I frame on the wall. My actual best friend. The one I talk to first. The one I check in with before I open the laptop. The one whose voice I know well enough to recognize when He's redirecting me.

It's never too late for that. That's the mercy that's new every morning. Not just forgiveness for yesterday — but a fresh invitation today. I'm reminded of Dennis Jernigan's “Daddy's Song”— that image of the Father calling out to His son every single day: Son, come walk with me in the cool of the evening. Not a command. Not a rebuke. Just a Father who keeps showing up at the door of the day and asking for the one thing He actually wants most — your company. Come back. Walk with me. The nets can wait.

Maybe you're reading this and you're in the middle of your own season of empty nets. You're doing the right things. You're showing up. You believe God is faithful because you have seen Him be faithful before. But the waiting is long and the results are thin and some mornings the faith wavers just enough to scare you a little.

That wavering doesn't disqualify you. It just means you're human and you're honest. God can work with both of those.

Cast the net again. But before you do — talk to Him. Not about the net. Just talk to Him. Rebuild that. Make that the one thing.

Everything else follows.

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