I’m a girl who panics when I don’t have a water bottle with me.  I want to always know that I can grab a drink if I feel a little parched.  Imagining a village without access to clean drinking water shatters my heart and makes me want to run with a shovel and start well-digging myself.  So when I think of a woman meeting Jesus at a well, there for a jug of water after walking through desert-heat in the mid-day sun, my throat feels a little dry in sympathetic longing.  I’m thinking if I were her, I might’ve been a little impatient when he interrupted my vital task to ask for a drink for himself – especially when I realized he was a Jew, and Jews don’t talk to my kind of people.

Jesus didn’t worry about social restrictions, though.  He used that cup-of-water-request as a conversation starter, and then offered the hesitant woman living water… telling her if she drank it, she would “never thirst again.”

 

 

“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;
and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!  
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,  and you will delight in the richest of fare.
Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.”

(Isaiah 55:1-3)

 

Do you see where we gain our fill, nourishing our souls and quenching our thirst?  Listening to the very One who made us.  That desperation we may feel in the midst of a life that buzzes along, stimulating our senses but never really filling our starving selves – it’s quenched by the Words of God.  We listen to those by reading His word, the Bible.  We sate our thirst by drinking Him in, the Living Water, through His Word.

 

This month, I’ve been on a journey with a group of other women, digging into what God has to say to us through His word, spending intentional time praying for each other and encouraging each other to set aside some “good” things for some of the Best.

 

One of the things that’s been impressed on me again is that there are so many little distractions that try to steal my attention… and I have to be diligent to one-by-one set them aside as they pop up.  I have to be a curator of my own life… whether that be in the area of food, calendar, home, or social life.  I’m working on it, and some areas need a lot more work than others.  But I do know that the “necessary” is my time with the One who loves me perfectly.  And I know that no matter how many cups of beautiful coffee (coffee, buzz, buzz, buzz…) I may celebrate, my thirst will be once and fully quenched when I make Him, my Living Water, the priority.