Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Today's text

John 4:10-15

Jesus replied to her: If you only knew what God is offering and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me something to drink,' you would have been the one to ask, and he would have given you living water. 'You have no bucket, sir,' she answered, 'and the well is deep: how do you get this living water? Are you a greater man than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his sons and his cattle?' Jesus replied: Whoever drinks this water will be thirsty again; but no one who drinks the water that I shall give will ever be thirsty again: the water that I shall give will become a spring of water within, welling up for eternal life. 'Sir,' said the woman, 'give me some of that water, so that I may never be thirsty or come here again to draw water.’

Prayer

What is this water you give, Jesus, if not the life that fills you?

Your heart is fully open at its base to the Eternal Spring, the infinitely Loving Source of all that is. The root of your soul is a broad door opening into immeasurable eternity, into the abyss of the One who is Life. And from darkest depths flows a river of Life through your life.

And this you would do to me? You would open my heart to the heavy currents of divinity that they should well into my depths, making this life a bubbling fountain of the Eternal Spring.

The weight of such divinity will explode the choked arteries of my heart. Your currents are too heavy, too thick, too rapid. I cannot contain them. They are too much for me. I cannot control them. They will destroy what I am.

‘I know,’ you say, and smile.

And what can I say? ‘Dear Friend, give me this water always that I may never be thirsty.’ For I tire of this thirst.

But to slake this thirst means opening to the heavy currents of the Uncontainable. They wash away most of what we are. But still we pray: Show me the places, Eternal Spring, where the dearest freshness of everlasting newness may well in me.

Pr. David L. Miller