Living Water

October is a contemplative season, perhaps lost upon souls afflicted with an exclusionary strand of attention deficit disorder. We are a culture full of the present tense, of what’s happening now, of maintaining a hefty status quo whose brute force can only squelch any feeble attempt at looking upward. Or outward. Or inward.

I realize this morning as the sunlight diffuses into a few scattered clouds in a baby blue sky through my life’s window that I cannot provide through the living of my life, any generalities which sense the impending dangers to each of us within the framework of this worldwide lack of contemplation.

We live as though silence has nothing to say to us. No…I live that way. That is all that I can ever say.

It feels like putting a band-aid on a gushing, broken heart. It feels futile. What can one person do?

The silence tells me this morning that it is more impactful, more important to own the heart than to document the bleeding out of hearts in the plural, hearts in the comfort of numbers and society.

In the words of the Samaritan woman in the fourth chapter of John: Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!
I am that woman at that well. Not because I have had five husbands or because I am living with a man who isn’t my husband, but because whatever the particulars of my story might be, there is a man traveling through the noise of this world who can retell and foretell them. And most importantly, can untell them.

The woman at the well wasn’t living a good life, and yet she also wasn’t falsely insulated within her own goodness. Goodness, which like the water from Jacob’s well can only serve us day-to-day in rote survival. Goodness is a water which depletes our eternal parts in order to sustain itself, to pass off as a greater good than goodness can ever hope to be. There are many people walking around living what those of us who are “churched” would consider hopeless lives while we in the church hoard and scratch like so many roosters around Jacob’s finite well, secluding the location of the well where living water flows in abundance for all.

I believed for a long time that we Christians were hoarding the contents of this living well…no, wait…that I was hoarding the contents of this well in an attempt to preserve it, to keep the water and myself pure, to ensure my own children could drink of it first and would be able, by comparing the hope of living water to the hopelessness outside the doors of whatever church I was blessing with my own body heat, to see the difference. Or that it was a lack of faith on my part, or a lack of vision, or that I needed to keep praying about this for at least another hundred years before I could hope to know why.

This is what it really is: my inability to see my own redemption, my own constant need for it, the thirst I bring to contemplation every day, the base, ugly muddy water that fills my cup if I attempt to live on my own, alone. If I don’t want to run to everyone I see and share the joy of my own redemption, then have I truly come to terms with my own sin? Living water can never be sullied into anything less. Bring anyone to this well and you will see that this holds true. First, though, I must bring myself.


Submitted by guest writer, Kerri Snell. Published from her blog with permission