Living Water

The other day I was in a village helping Shelley with a Kid’s club. There were hundreds of kids that seemed to appear out of the sand to attend the hour-long program. Out of the hundreds of children’s I saw, one stands out in my mind over the rest. There was a girl who could not have been more than ten years old. She was tall and slender, simply dressed with her hair braided in the way of the Fulani people, and had a beauty even her melancholy face could not cover. She wore a sandal on her right foot, but there was a handkerchief wrapped around the stub where her left foot should have been. She did not come to the club. She merely passed by on her way to draw water from the village’s well. I stared in disbelief as she used her stub on the well’s foot pump to fill her five-gallon bucket. As she lifted the bucket to her head and walked back to her home, I thought my heart would break with each hobbled step she took.

The rest of the week I could not shake the image of that girl. I would wonder how she lost her foot. In Africa, there are numerous possible causes for the countless deformities seen on every street corner, most of which are preventable. Was it a birth defect? Was it an infection that had to be amputated? Was it leprosy, a disease that still preys on the developing world? I then wondered how often she had to draw water. She had probably been doing it since she was six or seven, maybe four or five times a day, depending on how many siblings she had to share the chore. She will have to continue her regrettable march each day until she has a child she can send. But would she ever have a child to free her from her task? What man would pay to marry a girl with such a deformity? As often as these questions haunt me, I try to respond with prayer. I still pray for her when I wake up and I pray for her before I go to bed.

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Last week a volunteer group came from the states to help with ministry. One of the stops on their whirlwind trip was at the orphanage we help sponsor. The team brought with them two tubs filled with water guns. The orphanage had filled several 50-gallon barrels in anticipation of the water battle that ensued. It wasn’t long before the orphans that had been cleaned and groomed for the American visitors were soaked and caked with the sandy soil of the courtyard. The joyful screams of orphans and adult businessmen and women brought the entire neighborhood to the orphanage gates. Neighborhood children peered through the doors with wide eyes, ready to forsake their parents for the chance to partake in the bliss they witnessed. I ran around like a madman, trying to escape the massacre of orphans who quickly became experts at squirting their guns in my eyes, ears and even up my nose. I haven’t had so much fun since I was their age, doing the same thing.

But, at the end of the battle, the thought of the one-footed girl drawing water came back to my mind. I bet she would never waste a drop of her water. I don’t think you would ever find her in the middle of a water gun fight. If she ever witnessed such a spectacle she would probably think it a tremendous waste. A barrel of water is too great a blessing to throw it around so carelessly.

In the fourth chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus meets a woman by a well. He starts telling her about the gift of God, which is like “living water.” He tells her, “Everyone who drinks of this water (the well) will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty forever. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman’s response makes me think of my one-footed girl. “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

I wonder how God sees our efforts at our own salvation. Maybe to him we look my girl, struggling, despite incredible circumstances, to gather water in a desert. We forsake the fountain of life for the broken cisterns we have constructed ourselves. We fight and struggle to store the source of life in bottles and jars, only to find them depleted at the end of the day. I think He is watching us and saying, “If you would just ask me I would give you living water. You would never be thirsty or have to struggle any longer.” He isn’t called the well of every blessing, where you have to come and struggle to draw out life. He is the fount of every blessing that shoots out life freely to all who seek it. He wants us to put down our buckets and pick up super soakers because in Him salvation is like orphans in the desert having a water gun fight.