Thirsty: Longing for a drink, desiring a drink, dry, parched, dehydrated, desperate.
This term gets thrown around now, especially in a college town, for someone who is desperate, and while it’s used in terms of relationships and physical desires, still the term desperate sticks with me. We’re all thirsty. We’re all longing and desiring something. It’s obvious if we examine our own lives and just spend any time in the world.
I was reading through John chapter 4 today and a couple things just struck me. In John 4 we meet a Samaritan woman who meets Jesus Christ. She went up to the well, because she was thirsty. She came up thinking she was thirsty for a drink. But Christ knowing her story, knowing she had left 5 husbands and was now with a man who wasn’t her husband, knew what she was really thirsty for. He explains to the woman that whoever drinks the water from the well will be thirsty again but all who drink the living water of Christ will never be thirsty again.
I realize in my life that I’m always thirsty. I’m always desperate. I have a human heart.; a heart that needs constant fulfillment. I am desperate for many things depending on the time and situation; sometimes it’s for control, it’s for my way, it’s for knowledge, and sometimes it’s desperation to be desperate for Christ. But my biggest desire in the depth of my heart and soul is to be loved. I want to be loved more than anything.
My friends and I have a little joke about how we all have “love cups” and everyone’s love cup may look different and need filling in different ways and different time intervals. For example my roommates love cup is more like an espresso cup that is emptied out very very slowly, and must be filled delicately, my best friends is just like a mug that is filled regularly but filled with something of high quality. And then there’s mine… which is more like a gigantic open love keg, if you will, love is constantly pouring out and it’s constantly needing to be refilled and refilled. And the reality is that Christ is there to always fill up our “love cups” whatever they may look like, however often they need filling, the correct way and with the finest of the finest quality. We just have to take it to the well of living water.
So the woman learns of the living water, the water that I need to remember to drop my own love cup into to be filled, and then what happens next strikes me.
“Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town…”
I LOVE to travel. And I have many friends in different countries. My best friends in the world live in Colombia and I think of the times visiting them… and the image pops in my mind of stepping off the plane, searching in the crowd for them, and seeing them, and I instantly drop the luggage weighing me down and run into their open arms, leaving all of my personal possessions on the ground. It’s like at that moment all the worldly goods lose their value, they mean nothing in comparison to the love of my friends.
So this woman… she leaves her water jar and goes back to town. In essence she “dropped her luggage”. She drops the reason she came to the well in the first place. She came with her jar and with a plan, and she left with joy and a purpose. Her thirst was finally quenched and the jug was forgotten. No hesitation, no clinging. What motivated this abandonment? An encounter with Christ…
Letting go of the jars in my life isn’t easy, and yet I don’t see the Samaritan woman debating or weighing the odds or anything, the woman didn’t have to think twice. I come to Christ with jars. We all come to Christ with jars. They come in various shapes and sizes and we all fill them with different things, people, possessions, property, plans, etc. We hold onto them with a death grip until our knuckles are white because they give us purpose and often times we allow them to define us. The woman met Christ and left her jar.
We can’t embrace Christ fully if our hands are full.
The reality is that every Christ follower will have to take that walk to the well. And its not just a walk you take once.. we will have to continue to walk to the well and jars will have to be set at the feet of Jesus and that right there takes faith. There are some surrenders that are purely necessary for our lives to blossom. Certain things- I don’t have to name them, because we all know them in our souls – choke us and wound us in ways that stop us from ever being able to move forward.
I’m realizing a lot lately that my jars are my familiarity and my comfort. I have jars filled with plans and possessions. I have jars full of my past and my pain. I have jars representing relationships and jars filled with dreams. But these things are not my future. I must learn to let go. Clinging only paralyzes me. My unwillingness to surrender these things keeps me in bondage, unable to move on, or to move anywhere really. God is calling me to constantly meet him at the well of his grace and love and to release my jars of bitterness, jealousy, grief, guilt, envy, pride, plans, fear, insecurity, and he is calling me to continuously give him my “gigantic love keg” to fill up.
