WATER

Because of my health status I have to live with a bottle of water with me at all times so that I can sip on water throughout the day.  My salivary glands were fried in the undergoing of thirty radiation treatments in my neck and mouth area, and the lack of moister in my mouth has become a new, annoying, and daily routine for me.  It’s a challenge but it is my lot, and I have tried to rise to the occasion to do what I must do to maintain my health.

With this new way of being in my world I have been thinking a lot about something Jesus said.  To a woman at a well in Samaria Jesus said, “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” (John 4:14).

What a wonderful image, a spring of water welling up (surging, gushing, flooding, rising) to eternal life. It reminds me of an artesian well, a well made by boring into the earth and in which the water flows up due to internal pressure of some kind.  The water rises to the surface, bubbling up.  This is how Jesus describes what it means to drink of the water of life He gives.  It’s like an artesian well; a spring of water that just keeps welling up in a person’s life. 

My doctors have drilled it into my head, “Don’t get dehydrated.”  I am told that 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. Is that possible?  Furthermore, in 37% of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is often mistaken for hunger. The real shocker to me is that a lack of sufficient water is the number one trigger of daytime fatigue (according to www.Snopes.com).  According to www.livescience.com, and with a few exceptions, after three days, you need water or you'll perish. (Note to self!  Keep that bottle of water nearby).

Isn’t it interesting that the Bible is filled with references to the work of God in human life using the metaphor of water? (For example see Isaiah 12:3, 49:10, 55:1; John 7:37-39; Revelation 21:6, 22:17).  We are called to drink of the water of life.  I grew up in Southeast Missouri and the San Joaquin Valley of California. I know hot from first hand experience.  I also know the marvelous wonder of a glass of cold water on a hot summer day.  When I think of the words of Jesus my mind instantly goes back to my childhood and the value of keeping water nearby.

Jesus brings to us the awesome thought that the water of God is a spring of water, a spring that never goes dry and is always “welling up to eternal life.” “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.”

In Jesus we don’t just get isolated drinks of water; we get a living spring of water, always present, also redemptive, always healing, always restoring, and always filling us with the very reality of God.  It is water that baptizes us into the life of God, keeps us clean from anti-spiritual pollution, and keeps us hydrated in the realities of the kingdom of God.

I don’t know who gets the credit but I read recently this important paragraph about water.  It says, “The body needs about 3 quarts of water a day to operate efficiently. It helps break up and soften food. The blood, which is 90 percent H2O, carries nutrients to the cells. As a cooling agent, water regulates our temperature through perspiration. And without its lubricating properties, our joints and muscles would grind and creak like unused parts of some old rusty machinery.”  That’s a pretty descriptive definition of the need for water in our physical bodies, isn’t it?  It helps us understand the correlation between physical water and spiritual water, too.

The spring of water welling up in us to eternal life keeps us spiritually hydrated.  The water of the kingdom of God flows in and through us keeping us healthy, alive, and alert.  It quenches our thirst. It satisfies our inner longings.  It refreshes us when the journey gets tough.  It re-invigorates our life in Christ when we are tired and broken and in need of rest.

The water of life; It has a wonderful ring to it, doesn’t it?  And the water of life is offered to us without the need to have money because this water is without cost.  The word is, “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1).  Are you thirsty for something more?  Come.  Jesus is waiting at the well in you, and He has water that will re-ignite your life.  Thirst no more.  Come to the water.

VOCATION

In his book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, Parker Palmer asks, “What am I meant to do?  What am I meant to be?” (2).  These questions are asked in the reality that many times we allow ourselves to live the life that is expected of us by significant others in our lives.  We live, but not true to who we are, what our life is about, or what it means for us to be who we are. 

Palmer directs us to a poem in which this statement is made: “Ask me whether what I have done is my life” (“Ask Me,” by William Stafford).  This statement has hit a tender spot in my life because I sometimes (often) wonder if I have ever really connected with the real me, the me created in the image of God, the me honestly seeking to live in response to that creation.  Many times I have asked “Who am I,” and “What is my life to be about,” and “How do I fit into the scheme of things?”  A thousand times I have asked, “What difference does it make that I am living or that I have lived in this world?”

As I look back at sixty-five years of being here I have wondered many times what Palmer articulates so well.   Have I not somehow stumbled into a way of being where “I had simply found a ‘noble’ way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart” (3).   

Parker Palmer has set me to thinking about myself, my life, my relation to the world in which I live, my relation to God.  I am wondering if maybe I have inadvertently lived a life of “distortion of my true self” (3).  I’m not sure I know how to process this “wondering,” but I do know that I long to live truthfully to what I have been created to be and to do.

Today I find myself at the beginning of a new season in my life where I am invited to be who I am; at least that’s how I feel about it.  In the days remaining to me I want to be extraordinarily intentional to listen to my life.  To put it another way, I want to be extraordinarily intentional to listen to the presence of God because Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you [in your midst] (Luke 17:21).

I feel like God is inviting me into a time of kingdom awareness, a time of drawing close to Him in the everyday and ordinary.  I believe the invitation has been there all along.  I have tried to walk in light of that invitation, and have to some degree, but I hunger to go deeper into the things of God.  I long for God to be God in me and in my life experiences.  I long to lay my questions, concerns, longings, and issues before Him in an honest and transparent relationship. 

I want to respond to the request, “Ask me whether what I have done is my life,” with a YES.  Yes, in Christ I have lived the life God designed in me to live.  I lived truthfully to the creative design of God in me.  Yes, I have allowed the fingerprints of God to be all over my life as He has shaped and formed me into the image of Christ in the spirit of the word which says, “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). 

I long to be one of those people of whom it can be said, “Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19).