Nobody Carries Water Alone

Picture a church fellowship meal in the middle of a hard week. Somebody brought three casseroles because she figured somebody else would forget, a man who just lost his job is laughing at the dessert table, and the widow who almost stayed home is getting more hugs than she can count. Nobody announced that this was a ministry, but every person in that room went home a little less thirsty than they came.

Jesus met a thirsty woman at Jacob’s well “about the sixth hour” (John 4.6), which is high noon, so you may as well expect the heat. The diagnosis, the layoff, and the empty chair at Thanksgiving are going to find all of us sooner or later, so get ready now.

Here is the good news. You do not have to face the dry season by yourself, and God never meant for you to try. When the heat comes, most of us reach for a puddle first, whether that is the phone at midnight, the shopping cart, or the “I’m fine” we say at the door. God calls those “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2.13). A church family is not the spring, because only the Lord is “the fountain of living waters.” What a church family can do is walk you back to the spring when you are too tired to find it on your own. They can help you walk to the Living Water.

The woman of John 4 shows us how it works. Once she drank from the living water Jesus offered, she left her jar and ran into town telling everybody, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did” (John 4.29). One thirsty woman became a guide to water for a whole town.

What can you do this week?

• Pick one person in a dry stretch and call them, write them a card, or save them a seat on Wednesday night.
• Pray with them before you talk about the weather, and when they ask how you made it through your own drought, remind them to drink from the Living Water.

Just some thoughts.