Cistern, Well or Spring?
Last week’s post was certainly not about an everyday event, but the God who was active in such an event is still active in my everyday life, offering me choices about how I will live…
When astronomers are exploring the surface of other planets, they are all interested in one thing (not the only thing, mind you): Is there, or has there ever been, water on the planet? Why? Nothing and no one lives without water.
When we first-worlders want water, we walk to the faucet and turn the tap on. We know little of wells (unless we work for the city water department) and less of springs.
Those who live in less engineered places may find it easier to understand some parts of Scripture. For instance, Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well (John 4): A well is a hole dug by much human effort down to the water table, sometimes through solid rock, to find that place where the ground is permanently saturated with water. Opening such a place allows the water to accumulate near the bottom and to be drawn up by a container with a rope attached. As long as the water level stays the same, the water, purified by its journey through the rock, may be dipped up and safely consumed for centuries as a result of that first man’s hard work.
A spring is a place where an outlet for the subterranean water occurs without any excavation on man’s part. The water from a spring is perpetually fresh and clean, delicious and refreshing. One need only bend at its edge and drink.
It was these two water sources that Jesus likened to the choice the woman had about how to live her life: trudge daily to the well and work hard for what could be found there, or be refreshed continuously by fresh water springing from within through no work of her own. Her choice and resulting great joy compelled an entire town to trust in Jesus!
There is a third option: cistern. This is like an underground rain barrel, dug out, plastered so the water won’t leak out, made to catch rainwater. In a climate that may only get 10 inches of rain in a good year, and the water table might be a thousand feed down, cisterns are a good idea for harvesting the water that comes periodically from the sky. The water one draws from a cistern may be stale, having run off roofs and shallow ditches some months before, provided the plaster job holds and the thing doesn’t leak.
When the God who offers His own Living Water to me compares my resources to a self-dug, leaky cistern, like He does in Jeremiah 2, He is speaking truly.
When I seek to meet my own needs by sweat equity, I will come up short. When I attempt to live this “follow Jesus every day” life in my own strength, I will find I am drawing from a broken cistern. Independence makes a poor spring.
The Triune God, who from eternity has dwelt in community in Himself, seeks a similar type of community with me, with humankind, knowing that the result of that relationship will be a fresh shared life, a spring of living water. Sometimes it’s a trust dance and sometimes it’s a limp, but in Him I find life! That’s why I am
Following Jesus every day in the everyday,
Christi
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