Calling Was Not Enough
The word for Wednesday, August 26, 2026 is Calling Was Not Enough.
The anchor verses are Psalm 40:2 and John 21:9.
Scott Grissom took his dog Carl out to a friend's farm in Dickson County, Tennessee, on a Thursday evening earlier this month.
Carl is a Lagotto Romagnolo. Thirty pounds. Five years old. He spent that evening swimming in the creek and running with the other dogs, and then the group headed toward a lookout point.
When it was time to go, Carl was gone.
Grissom put the first ten minutes this way.
“We stood there for ten minutes calling and calling, calling for him.”
Then they heard Carl down the side of the cliff and understood what had happened.
Carl had gone over the edge. He had fallen more than a hundred feet down a cliff that runs about two hundred feet to the creek below. Part of that face is a sheer wall roughly seventy feet high.
He was alive. He had landed on a narrow ledge near a small cave, and the ledge was barely wide enough to hold him.
The rescue turns on one fact.
Carl could hear them.
They were up at the top calling into the dark, and he was down on that ledge, and he could hear every word of it, and he could not come.
He was not being stubborn. He was not sulking. There was no version of Carl trying harder that got him up roughly seventy feet of sheer rock in the dark. The distance between him and the voices above him was not a distance he could close.
A neighbor named Bert Echols brought out a drone and searched deep into the night. In the first light of morning, he found Carl on the ledge. Grissom had spent the night knowing his dog was somewhere below and still being unable to reach him.
Carl was on that ledge about seventeen hours.
In the morning, four fire departments came. Two firefighters went over the edge on ropes, down to where Carl was. He was exhausted and anxious, but he wagged his tail. They guided him into a rescue bag and raised him back toward the voices he had been hearing all night. The rescue took about twenty minutes.
Nobody called louder.
Somebody climbed down.
At daybreak in the last chapter of John, seven disciples are out on a boat in Galilee. They have caught nothing all night. Peter is there. Earlier, beside a charcoal fire in a courtyard, he had denied three times that he knew Jesus.
A figure on the shore calls out and asks whether they have any fish. They say no. HE tells them to put the net on the other side.
When they come ashore, John records one detail about the beach.
As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread.
The fire was already burning. Fish was already on it, and there was bread.
All of it was waiting when they came in from a night of catching nothing.
HE did not stand on the beach shouting instructions about their spiritual condition. HE fed them breakfast.
Peter had denied HIM three times beside a charcoal fire, and the word John uses for the fire on that beach is the same word he used for the fire in that courtyard. It appears twice in the whole New Testament, and those are the two places.
The second charcoal fire was already burning when Peter came ashore, with breakfast waiting beside it.
Psalm 40 gives the rescue the same direction.
He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
Brought me up. Not called down to me. Not sent word. Came and got me and put my feet on something solid.
That is the shape of what GOD does, and it has never been anything else. GOD has never once run a rescue by megaphone. HE came in the flesh, born into a country under occupation and a family forced to travel while Mary was pregnant. HE went all the way down to a grave.
There is a version of faith that sounds like people standing at the top of a cliff calling louder. Pray harder. Believe more. Try again with more sincerity this time.
Some of you have been hearing that for years while stuck on a ledge, and you have not been able to come, and you have concluded the failure is yours.
Carl did not rescue himself and nobody expected him to.
The whole story is that two men went over the edge, in the morning, on ropes, down to the exact place where he already was.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who can hear the calling and cannot come.
- 🙏 To the one who has been told your problem is that you are not trying.
- 🙏 To the one who has been on the same ledge a long time in the dark.
- 🙏 To the one going over an edge this morning for somebody who cannot climb.
Grace and Peace.