When we left the scene yesterday, Jesus was sitting at a well, asking a Samaritan woman for a drink of water. She did not immediately comply, asking rather, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
Jesus gives a puzzling answer: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” She assumes that living water means running water, and shoots back: “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” She reminds him how historic this well is in the shared history of Jews and Samaritans: “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”
The patriarch Jacob is the one whom God renamed Israel. This was his well. She is bringing out the big guns, “Who do you think you are, mister?”
Jesus doesn’t take the bait. He gives an even more puzzling reply: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
Not just trickling, not just welling up – gushing. That is the promise of God to us – that those who accept the living water, which is the life of God, the activity and presence of the Holy Spirit, are already being fed by a wellspring that gushes to eternal life. It is already part of our life, and will never run out. We don’t have to thirst for God – God has drawn near and fills us from a source that never ends.
I like to think of the living water as a literal river splashing through our bodies, our minds, our spirits, refreshing us, and bearing away debris that blocks the flow of God’s life in us, that holds us back to old ways. This stream is always carrying fresh water to stagnant and dry places in us. This water is the source of fresh ideas, deeper compassion, unexplained healing, inexplicable love.
What are you thirsty for today? What in you feels dry or arid – or swampy and stagnant? Make a note in your prayer journal, if you’ve started one.
Sometimes we can answer that question by noting what it is we always pray for.
But remember, we don’t have to pray “to” and pray “for” – we are invited to pray with God. The Spirit of God, who is that living water, prays within us, inspiring and answering our prayers.
If you are thirsty for more of God-life in your life, invite the Spirit to quicken the flow of living water. Visualize that spring or well or fountain and imagine a trickle turn to flowing and then gushing.
Splash in it, drink of it, imagine in prayer sharing it with the people you care about. In your imagination, bring those people to your well and see yourself giving each a drink of this living water that heals.
Trust it. It is an eternal gift to you, already here, never running out.
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