No Water

It's been hard to write lately. My silence has not fundamentally been a scheduling issue or even a case of writers' block. The problem is that my heart has been reluctant to embrace the mission of this blog: to take every thought captive to obey Christ and to rejoice in the sufferings that are producing endurance, character, and hope in me. It has settled for a self-analysis that doesn't produce transformation and reaped a stagnant self-criticism and latent anger.

The shift from liturgy of faith to litany of complaints was slow, but I can hardly say that it's been subtle. Last week, I caught myself crying out to the Lord in frustration, "Have you brought me here just to abandon me?" I am not the first grumbling Israelite to speak these words:

Now there was no water for the congregation. And they assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron. And the people quarreled with Moses and said, “Would that we had perished when our brothers perished before the Lord! Why have you brought the assembly of the Lord into this wilderness, that we should die here, both we and our cattle? And why have you made us come up out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place? It is no place for grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, and there is no water to drink.” Numbers 20:1-5

No water. That's how my life feels right now. But the truth is that water for the Israelites was quite near--it just wasn't yet in a recognizable form. A rod and a rock; an act of faith and an act of God.

It is so easy to believe that I will be satisfied when X, Y, and Z are resolved, but when I believe that these things are necessary for my sustenance, then I begin to challenge God. It's no forty-year journey from the "I need" to the shaking fist. Can't you hear the chains rattling? I am enslaved to the things I see, not liberated by what I believe.

No Water. If God did not withhold from me his only Son, how will he not also along with him graciously give me all things? If I see no water, it is only because I do not recognize it. I remember another woman who stood before the Living Water and did not have eyes to see:

A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” John 4:13-15

I will not be enslaved by my own circumscribed vision; I choose to believe today that what does not yet look like water is truly water. And, by the grace of God, I will settle for no water but the water from the rock.