It’s Memorial Day weekend, and summer has officially begun, which means the movie Jaws will play approximately 3,459 times over the next three months, and that means plenty of people are going to hear the movie’s most famous line a lot.

(Side note: the line was actually ad libbed, but only after being subconsciously planted in the mind of the actor who said it.)

As Roy Scheider’s character is throwing the chum into the water, he gets his first look — an extremely up-close look! — at the shark, and then slowly backs away while muttering the now famous words:

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

The need for a bigger structure to be able to handle an overwhelming mission is natural, but I wonder if there may be a supernatural response that God has in mind for us.

At the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, as he was beginning to call his disciples to follow him, Jesus told the fisherman soon to be fishers of men to let their nets down for another catch. They were tired, had already started cleaning up after a long night of unsuccessful fishing, and yet they decided to do what he asked. Luke’s gospel tells us what happened next.

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Can we have a word (or 325) about grace?

Grace enables us to do; it doesn’t reward us for doing. This is such an important truth for us to grasp because there is work to be done, and whenever we work, we run the risk of comparing. We compare our work to another’s. Our reward to another’s. Our worth to another’s.

But grace isn’t comparable. It is, by its nature, incomparable because it is given equally to all. It has to be due to the simple fact that we all need grace, especially since we will all eventually abuse it.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with being misunderstood, and for that reason, I have grown to love the implication of the day between the cross and the empty tomb.

It is a day of … silence, and is often referred to as Silent Saturday because there seems to be nothing happening between the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus.

Of course, on this side of both of those events we know that there was an eternity of things happening on the middle day, but think for a moment from God’s perspective on that first day of silence.

God was willing to be misunderstood. He was willing to be questioned, doubted, and even blamed for the tragedy that had taken place the day before, not by people who didn’t love him, but by those who did.

We’d seen this willingness to be falsely accused in the life and ministry of Jesus, of course. He had been given a sham trial and a pointless death sentence (the redemptive plan of God notwithstanding), and had remained silent. He had come to a people who refused to join him on the mission, even after his strategy was the opposite of the one who had gone before him, and been rejected as well. This is how he explained it in the red letters of Matthew:

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