From What Well Are You Drinking Today?

I've picked up running again and it is so good. Those cool mornings watching the sky unfold as he paints it to life for another day never cease to hand me mercies anew. The air is crisp and the trees are part of his gallery too. I worship and reflect as the dog pants at my feet. We are an orchestra down below bringing sound to His show.

In the praises and the pleas, I have been panting too, I think. And no, not just while running, though my sounds probably far out-sing the dog when I trudge up those country hills. The panting—maybe not so loud but inside the weariness and brokenness of life has gained and I identify with the woman at the well, the one who came from the dirt like me. 

Don't we all pant after water which satisfies straight into eternity? Enough of this processed stuff. Give me the real deal. I'll take the whole spring, in fact.

I spent so many years drinking from the well of midnight fast food runs and ice cream by the half gallons. Bags of peanut-butter M&Ms and trays of doughnuts which have absorbed into my body in some attempt to satisfy this unceasing thirst unmet. Hours and days and weeks of glaring down into the well of my stomach upturned beneath me. Those moments of stilled breath waiting for the number to reveal how good or bad my day—I took shots from that glass too. I've tried to fill up with cup after cup of starvation and thirsted for the miles beneath my feet, as they grow in number and frequency and drive me to more and more to satisfy just a moment. 

But they aren't the spring washing me anew and flooding me back to life; rather the sewage in which I find myself stuck. 

The satisfactions never came for long. So within days and hours, even minutes sometimes, I would  have to search for it again. Maybe some Reeses this time, with a milkshake to help em go down. I remember feeling trapped in a pit and some days I could eat thousands and thousands of calories only to throw them up, but just find myself sinking deeper into the muck and mire—and I smelled really bad. 

Part of me grew content in the sewage too—I deserved this because I was a dirty girl and dirty girls deserve to live in dirty places. Some dirty girls are too nasty to ever clean up, I remember thinking, and you are just one of those girls. 

The woman at the well is still in sin—with another man to whom she is not yet even married. Christ is bold in his revealing of her sin and we see His sovereignty through it. He was like that with me too. One day He offered to forklift me out from my sewage and He made me clean. Like, for real clean and new too.

Like the woman drinking from the well of her sixth husband, I also attempt to find satisfaction and fulness in the things that drive me toward emptiness, again and again and again.

By the sixth time you'd think she would notice a pattern or something, huh?

After eight years of being consumed in bulimia, you'd think I might have noticed it wasn't working either?

So why is it so easy for us to forget, even after He clothes us in white and calls us by a new name? I think life is hard and messy and busy. We lack eternal perspective and we are so easily ensnared by this glimpse of the world that fails to tell us it is ending. Though, sometimes we just wish it would—we want to be free that bad. Good thing Jesus sets captive free—and He offers it to us freely.

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

So I ask, from what well are you drinking today? Is it satisfying into eternity?