Mending the Net

In a coastal village in Louisiana, a Vietnamese Catholic grandmother named Bà Lan spent thirty years repairing fishing nets after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her community. She was one of the first climate refugees in America, though nobody called her that then. Every morning she sat on her porch with calloused hands, threading new rope through torn mesh, even as politicians debated whether her drowning parish was worth saving.

James writes that those who persevere under trial will receive the crown of life. But Bà Lan would have told you the crown was never the point. The mending was the point. The refusal to abandon a place that the powerful had written off — that was the holy work.

Progressive faith asks us to sit with an uncomfortable truth: perseverance is not simply an individual virtue. It is a communal act of resistance against systems that would prefer we give up and move on. When we endure, we testify that the people and places the world calls expendable are beloved by God.

Rachel Held Evans once wrote that faith does not mean the absence of doubt but the stubborn decision to show up anyway. Bà Lan showed up with needle and rope, day after day, until her neighbors found the courage to rebuild beside her.