“You do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep…” John 4:11
When I was a child, we spent many weekends at a “country place” owned by friends. This was back in the 1960s and early ‘70s, and the simple cabin on 80 acres in Gasconade County, Missouri didn’t have indoor plumbing or running water. So if we wanted water, we had to pump it from the old red cistern well, a crank-type contraption that usually required eight or nine good turns before water would come flowing from the spigot. I can still feel the handle in my hands; can still count the turns in my mind. You had to go deep, but it was worth the work and the wait. The water was cool, fresh and clean. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to fetch water on my own, for that was a sure sign that I was growing up.
In John’s gospel, Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well and asks her for a drink, even though he had no bucket in which to catch the water. This story is really about Jesus offering her “living water,” that will make her never thirst again, but within that story, for me, is this idea of the well as prayer, as a place that we must go as we mature in Christ, a place that takes a little work and some patience, a place that delivers Jesus himself, becoming for us both the water and the well, the sustenance and the source. We must go to this source often, armed with a bucket to catch the life-giving water that comes from deep within, left there for us to fetch by the giver, the creator, the spirit of life. Or if not a bucket, at least outstretched hands ready to receive.
Ask yourself in silence: How often do I go to the well? What’s keeping me from going deep?
Thanks for repeating some memories of springs in my childhood!
I remember well when my brothers and I, as half-orphaned children were left in the care of an uncle on a rather run down farm. We were grateful, at least for a roof over our heads. And yes, one of our daily chores was to draw water from the well. It wasn’t a pump contraption but one with a bucket attached to a long rope which had to be lowered manually. In retrospection, we were too young to realise the danger as we peered down the sides of the well, deep and dark, bent over almost to our waists to see if the bucket had reached the water below. The water was truly refreshing and almost ‘sweet’ in its freshness. We washed our faces and the icy coldness jolfed whatever sleepiness still lingered in our eyes.
And so as children of God, we must remind ourselves to drink from HIS well often, our true sustenance, to go with a humble and contrite heart and be jolted into realising and be thankful that this source is always there for our asking and taking, if we but stretch out our hands to HIM. What solace, what comfort.