Along came a spider!
In 2022, I was questioning if God wanted me to continue with commercial fishing. I was moving my scuba tanks out of storage to have them serviced. The next day I was rushed to the hospital because of a spider bite on my calf. I decided to take that year off from diving for green sea urchins. The ocean waters of Maine are no place to be if questioning if God is not with you. I decided it was time to go into full time street preaching, a pursuit that was relentlessly pulling me. This was a dream my wife Anna and I had shared for many years. She was in full agreement. We launched Casting Nets and organized regional youth rallies called “Rise”. Turnout was less than desireable and nobody seemed to want to work with us. We were able to reach a few and the glory that accomanied our meetings, sparse as they were, was a seal that God was truly with us. I built a 10ft cross with a wheel, dragged it all over Maine, street preached in city squares and busy intersections. What amazed me the most was the power of the cross to expose what was in the heart, whether hate or joy, Satan or Jesus. The other thing that amazed me was the power of the Gospel. I preach a bold, no compromise message, a call to true dicipleship and to forsake all. I witnessed firsthand the conviction of the holy spirit fall on precious souls lost in sin. Men who were jeering and laughing at me, turning somber, dropping thier heads and examining their ways. One man asked me, “Are you having any success?” I told him that I had nothing but success wherever I turned. This is because the Gospel never fails. It is the power of God to save and it can do nothing but succeed. If the Gospel does not save, then it hardens. It saves, it hardens, it damns. Nobody can sit under the true Gospel being proclaimed under the anointing of the Holy Spirit and remained unchanged. Now it is the Lords will that all come to repentance and that nobody is damned. I am always on the side of mercy. But make no mistake, those of stubborn heart and resist God only receive light that condemns them when they obey not the Gospel of God. Back to my story. The following spring we felt lead by the holy spirit to look into buying a motorhome. We looked at all sorts or options and finally found one that we adored, a 40ft 2008 Monaco, class A diesel pusher. We went to look at it and fell in love. I asked the man why he was selling it and he said he had suffered a spider bite and had gotten terrible sick because of it. The doctors misdiagnosed him and the infection traveled into his spine. The parrallell had us thinking. A spider was moving me out of commercial fishing and into the Monaco and moving him out.
We did outreaches in Maine all Summer and into the fall of 2023. We carried our cross from Kittery to Fort Kent Maine. City Squares, busy intersections, county fairs, wherever we could find people out and about we sang our songs and preached the word. Time and time again, we witnessed Gods glory and power, for the masses and the individual, but cold weather was setting and our widow was closing in the Northeast.
After much preparation and tremendous opposition from the enemy, we left Maine for warmer fishing grounds in late November. Currently we are traveling around Texas preaching the Gospel. The ministry climate here is extemely indifferent. In the Northeast we get many reactions, good and bad. In Texas we get little to none. The youth are the ones who seem to have hunger and interest. Its as if, with a church on every corner, people have heard the Gospel so much, they have become Gospel proof. I am weeping over Texas, yearning to penentrate the great indifference and frigidity. But I am a commercial fisherman, the salt is in my bones and if Texas proves barren, we will steam to new fishing grounds where we can cast our nets for a great endtime harvest.