day 19 - springs

I'm in England visiting Mum at the moment.  Yesterday she asked the boys what they wanted to do and Josh said he wanted to take a photograph of the fountain in Letchworth !!!   He had seen it the last time we were here and for some reason capturing it on 'film' ( digital media) was the order of the day.  So off we went into town to do  our very best David Bailey impersonations.

  

Letchworth is a garden city so it is full of parks with ornamental fountains and lovely green spaces.  Nice eh?   It reminded me of Jesus saying to the Samaritan woman

13Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. 14But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a fount of water springing up to eternal life.”  John 4 13-14

Whenever Ive read this verse before, the picture above is pretty much what Ive imagined Jesus to be talking about.  A big gush of water shooting up, visible and impressive.  But today I started wondering if that is what  Jesus had in mind when he was talking about ' a fount of water'.  In Bible times did they have fountains like the one in Letchworth?   No.  Because mechanical fountains weren't invented till the 15th century so the best 1st century Roman civilization could manage was a water feature based around a natural spring.   For the ordinary Samaritan woman to whom Jesus was speaking at the well........ possibly her only point of reference would have been the hole in the ground she was standing beside when Jesus asked her for a drink.  Water was a precious commodity then ( and still) in the Middle East.  Life or death ,not something to use for entertainment.

This got me thinking about something Colin Symes posted on Facebook yesterday - a video clip of a spring he had walked to a few days previously - which was just basically the start of a tiny stream way up in the forest somewhere.  A fracture in the earth from which water bubbles up and trickles out.

For some reason I find this comforting.  Whenever I have imagined those streams of living waters which are supposed to be gushing out of me and flowing out to those around me I have always felt a sense of .... disappointment?  Resignation?  That Im not quite up to scratch.  Yes there might be a small trickle flowing out of me but I'm no Caesars Palace Las Vegas  😊  People don't stop and stare and marvel at my spiritual awesomeness.   In fact people barely notice that Im a Christian at all most of the time!

 GOOD NEWS!  Maybe Jesus never meant for me to be a twenty five foot fountain, perhaps a small but constant, life giving, unstoppable bubbling is what He needs me to be.  Maybe just gently gurgling away in the place He has put me I can water the dry ground round about and make the barren places fertile.  Perhaps this is what He meant when He said to the woman at the well that she would never thirst again.  Never quest again for meaning and significance and love because all those things would now be bubbling up in her heart daily, over and over, unstoppable and gently overflowing.

Im sure you have all had this revelation long ago and are smiling at my foolishness.   But it is good to stop and re-think the things you think you know and be ready for adjustment every now and again.  It's all part of that water being living instead of stagnant.