Dust Yourself Off: Living Water

I’m a hands on picture person. (Yes, this means I enjoy finger painting… but that’s not what I’m getting at today).  I constantly visualize, self-narrate, and actively participate in the world surrounding me.  If I’m unable to do this, I’m unable to fully comprehend; and as quickly as time passes, I dismiss whatever valuable truth may have been within the information given to me.  I don’t do this on purpose, it’s just the way my mind works.

So, for you visual learners with a love for word painted pictures and metaphorical stories:

This one’s for you.

In my world, it’s month 8 of the world race and I’m living in Bangalore, India.  The weather is your average 70-85 degrees Fahrenheit and it’s humidity is what I would call 0%.  It’s dry.  Really dry.  I put a thickly coated layer of lotion on my legs the other day and my skin soaked it all up, still feeling less than nourished.  I asked our contact, Ravi, when the rainy season was here and he said, “June and July (long pause) but sometimes it doesn’t rain.”  

Even their rainy season is…

Dry.  

Honestly, the only moisturizing sustenance I ever see hitting the ground here is the urine from all the men who pee on the side of the road.  And that really shouldn’t count.  The hustle and bustle of busy life being lived upon the dried up dirt of Bangalore’s city streets creates an inescapable cloud of dust.  It covers and clouds all parts of the day making skin ashy, eyes squinty, and lungs wheezy.

This same dust settling upon my physical life has been trying to settle upon my spiritual life as well.  My recognition of dust’s efforts to cloud the truth that beats within my body is both my inspiration for this blog and hope for a quickly approaching lavish rainy season.

There’s a few different ways this picture could expand.

1) I could live a life so comfortably hopeless in the cloud of dust that I don’t even recognize the cloud of dust I’m living in anymore.  My dry, cracked skin may bleed, but my clothing will cover it.  My eyes may stay half shut, but it doesn’t give me a headache anymore.  My lungs may huff and puff, but I no longer feel the need to move fast enough to push their limits anyways.  Plus, the wheezing sound has slowly faded from my ear drums reception in my mastery of selective hearing.  Surely ignorance is bliss.

2) I could recognize the cloud heavily descending upon me and come up with some really great ways to protect myself from it’s inevitable presence in my life.  Free hotel lotion.  $2 street vendor sunglasses. Pollution masks (aka surgical masks…they love those things here in Asia).  I suppose I could even pee on the dirt to see if it helps to reduce the dust overtaking me…  If you’re not on a racer’s budget, go ahead and splurge: grab a bottle of dove’s best moisturizer, Oakley’s #1 selling shade protection, and an entire oxygen tank face mask contraption.  I bet by now, we’ve done a great job of diagnosing AND masking the problem.  Who needs a cure to a sickness, when you can just mask the illness altogether?  Forgetting illness even plagues you to begin with.

Then there’s option 3) I could run to the well in the city that never runs dry (John 4:10-14).  I could stand, roots deeply planted, beside the river of flowing life running through the city’s center (Psalm 36:7-9, Psalm 65:9-10, Psalm 105:41-42) (I must not have seen it at first because of all the dust clouding my vision).  I could ask for rain.  An abundant rain.  A life giving rain.  A healing rain.  A rain I know will come, because the One who will bring it is trusting and faithful to the cries of His children. I could do all this instead.  Because this is the only real cure.  Dry, dusty dirt needs only one thing.  An abundant source of living water (Jeremiah 2:13, Ezekiel 47:9, John 7:37-38).

This concept sparked it’s re-ignition into my mind during a house visit one evening.  I had met a handsome young man by the name of Alex.  He was about 5 years old and slightly handicapped.  A little slower than the other kids, words slurred a little more than most, but his smile was fuller than the tiny room the 12 of us stood in and his eyes brighter than anything I’d ever seen.  He followed us to a few house visits until we landed ourselves in his home.  His mom shared their family’s needs.  One of them on the list being her son, Alex, would not be handicapped anymore.  When I heard the request, I couldn’t help but think, “Why would you want to change him? God made him so perfect.”  Why would you want to cover (mask) the magnificent presence of The Lord’s joy in Alex by making him different?  His handicap is God’s strength.  And God’s strength in him would be his family’s reminder of the joy of The Lord.  So I prayed that instead.  After I prayed, I told Alex’s mother what God had shared with me. 

“God made Alex perfect.  The joy he carries with him is the joy of Jesus.  When you forget who your provider is, who loves you, who cares for you, who has great plans for you; look to Alex and God will use him to remind you.  Delight in The Lord always.”  

His mom wept, I wept, we held each other in a hug, and then I left.

But I didn’t leave unaffected.  If I could see that Alex was made perfect, how could I not see this of myself?

I could believe God’s truth over Alex’s life, but I could not believe it for my own life.

What I have all too often believed for myself is a series of symptoms I’ve called diagnoses, which I have found my own cures (masks) for.

Symptoms:

Cure:

Here’s the thing about a cure to a diagnosis.  First, you have to know the true diagnosis, not just the name of a few symptoms.  Second, you have to be able to recognize the root of the diagnosis in order to attack it in treatment; to acknowledge not just the symptoms of the illness, but also the reason for the symptoms.

If I can not recognize sickness as a result of my inability to trust in God’s perfect fatherly love for ME, Jesus’s irreplaceable and complete sacrifice in death and victory in resurrection for ME, and the Holy Spirit’s guiding discernment in ME, then I’ve missed it.  

The only way we’ll ever experience the life abundantly available to us through Jesus is if we admit the illness of distrust and unbelief in our lives and combat it with the truth of the Trinity.

“When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that He [Jesus] was eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they said to His disciples, ‘Why is He eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners?’ And hearing this, Jesus said to them, ‘It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’ “ 

Is your mouth dry from all the dust?  Come drink your fill.

Revelation 7:16-17 (vs. 16 referenced in Isaiah 49:10)

Once you find the source of life giving water, don’t leave it.  For anything.  Ever.  Become a part of the river until it begins to run through you.

“Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ “ 

John 7:38 (referenced in Isaiah 12:3 and Ezekiel 47:1)