"No. I was there alone because when we arrived at your front entrance I jumped out of the car and my friends -- if you could call them that -- slammed the door and drove off, leaving me very drunk and very visible on your doorstep."

"So what did you do?"

"What could I do? I came inside and listened."

This young woman came to my study later in the week and every week for the next year before she finally responded to the winsome and authoritative call of Christ to become a disciple. Her story was fascinating. Brought up in a strict Bible-believing home, she rejected "the idea of God" as a little girl, remembering quite distinctly the time when she chose no longer to believe. Settling into her agnosticism, she nevertheless developed a keen social conscience which led her eventually to embrace Marxism. A brilliant student, she studied philosophy and then went on to law school before becoming a public defender with particular responsibilities for young people involved in crime.

Now, of course, she is a disciple of Jesus Christ skillfully disguised as a trial attorney, but first He had to get her attention. And He did it somehow as she sat under the influence of alcohol in a church service where she didn't believe a word that was being spoken. I still don't know how He did it and neither does she, but neither of us doubts that He did!

A year elapsed in this young lady's experience from the time she was first intrigued by Christ until she became His disciple. How long it took Simon to follow a similar path we do not know, but we do know that a process was involved in the call to which he responded. And processes take time.

After the initial meeting with Jesus, Simon returned to his boats and fish. Jesus, who had moved from His hometown of Nazareth to Capernaum, the lakeside city Simon called home, began to preach throughout Galilee. And wherever He went, the crowds followed Him, which must have made the local fishermen less than enthusiastic about the commotion all these people caused.

One day the crowd was so pressing that Jesus asked His acquaintance Simon to lend Him a boat so that He could push out from the shore before the crowd pushed Him into the water. Simon was glad to oblige; and a few minutes later the Master sat safely in the boat and spoke to the people sitting on the shore. To show His appreciation, Jesus said to Simon afterward, "Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch" (Luke 5:4).

But Simon declined for what he felt were very good reasons. He had fished all night and caught nothing, then had gone through the painstaking business of cleaning his nets, a chore made even more onerous because they were empty. He was not at all inclined to get those nets messed up again. Besides, if he couldn't catch fish before the sun was up there was little chance of getting them in the blaze of day. Yet as quickly as Simon voiced his objections, he agreed to Jesus' request: "But because You say so I will let down the nets" (v. 5).