Living Water, Come

My freshman year of high school, my friends all decided to take PE as their elective. Though I was much more suited to the yearbook class I ended up taking for the rest of my high school career, that first year I succumbed to their peer pressure and the chance to get more time with friends during school hours. Much to my chagrin, the class was taught by a coach who firmly believed there was no better way to warm up the body than with a one-mile run.

On the first day of PE, I emerged from the girl’s locker room with trepidation as my school-issued gym shorts stickily clung to my legs in the Alabama August heat. I remember thinking that being the last to finish the one-mile loop around our school would be the worst thing to ever happen to me (if only we could hug our 15-year-old selves, right?). So I ran, sprinting around that track as fast as my never-ran-a-mile-before legs could carry me. And when I finally came to the end, the only way to describe how I felt is to use the words of the Israelites as they wandered through the wilderness: “Why did you ever bring us up from Egypt to kill us…with thirst?” (Exodus 17:3).

While in that story there is a very clear physical need for water, I can also remember the desperate need for living water screaming from my soul. I can recall believing all the insecurity and identity lies, and what poured from my depths was a desperate hope of being liked and wanted by my peers. 

I think in many ways that’s why we love to tell the story of the Samaritan woman at the well in our Bible studies and our churches. We sense the same longing in her that we feel in ourselves, that ache to belong that brought her and her jar to Jacob’s well at noon. She encounters Jesus and leaves with the living water of the Messiah flowing from her. Even if nothing changed on the outside about her circumstances, she carried this gospel confidence into her town and gifted them the good news of the Messiah’s arrival. And it changed many lives.

It’s no accident then, that only a few chapters later, John writes Jesus’s words as He teaches at the Festival of Shelters: “The one who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him” (John 7:38). It’s like our hearts have hot and cold faucet taps: I can turn on the scorching tap of rejection, shame, fear, etc., or I can let the cool, refreshing tap of living water flow over and out of me. Jesus will be the living water either way, but there’s a very clear difference between a heart that’s living as if it trusts in the living water it already has, or the one that keeps going back to the hot water and feels its burn. As we think about what it means for Jesus to be our living water this Advent, I pray His love flows into those places where your heart is most longing to be seen, known, and loved.