I made the first trip by myself, full of anticipation of all that I would learn about the Holy Spirit, excited to be in a place with others as eager as myself.
Then, I walked into the room.*
All I had looked forward to vanished as fear settled over me. And the negative self-talk started, “What was I thinking, coming all alone?” “I don’t know anyone here, well, except for the pastor in charge, and he probably doesn’t remember me.” “I’ll just hide here on the back row.”
But as the worship poured forth and I made the spoken prayers my own, courage rose within me. Over the course of the first two days, a woman – who knew nothing of me or my thoughts – prayed over me, encouraging me not to be afraid. Another stranger passed me a note with the simple phrase, “the fruit is coming” – and I wept because those words meant more to me than I could understand. I even ran into two different friends who gave me smiles and hugs. And the couple I sat at lunch with? We had a dear friend in common. Only God.
So by the time we were released for dinner the second day, I was making God a promise – “Lord, I am seeing how many different ways your Holy Spirit moves and works among your people. I will do whatever you tell me to do.”
I kept walking as I prayed and pushed the exit door open. Stepping into the sunlight, I immediately heard God whisper, “Go back inside.”
My steps slowed as I started to question God why I would do such a thing, and He simply said, “I thought you’d do whatever I asked of you.”
I sheepishly grinned and turned around, heading back in the door I’d just walked through. Yet I had no idea where I was going, so I stepped aside to dig in my bag, looking for my sweater. When I heard it. The voice of my pastor friend – the one in charge.
I slowly turned around to see him greeting people near the exit.
My smile widened as I looked toward heaven, shaking my head in disbelief at God’s kindness. In that moment I felt incredibly seen and known by God. I had never formulated words to name my desire to be reunited with this long-ago-friend, but God had known. And He had made a way.
Deserts
I had arrived to that conference dried up. Like a desert. Full-time ministry while raising a family had exhausted me. All the giving had left me empty. And, loneliness had been real – despite the fact I was constantly surrounded by people. Without realizing it, I’d shown up for those three set-apart days hoping to be restored, refilled. Made new.
God met me at every turn. With every choice to obey, with every decision to trust, God caused new rivers to flow into my desert:
Behold, I am doing a new thing;
Isaiah 43:19 ESV
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
A few years before this particular conference, I’d been incredibly blessed to travel with our church to the Holy Land. I cannot begin to describe the awe that overtook me as I walked the places named and described in the Bible. One day we rode down the holy mountain that is Jerusalem, passing farms that flourished with fruit and flowers, until we got to the fertile valley of the Sea of Galilee, which, by the way, is a fresh-water lake.
The next day all the curves led us south and below sea level – through the dusty desert to the Dead Sea.
The tiny country of Israel contained such contrasts, that my mind spun. Such highs and lows. Such verdant beauty and dry nothingness. I remember thinking to myself, “This is the ‘wilderness’ that Moses and the people of God wandered for forty years…”
To this day there are Bedouin clans that continue to raise sheep the way Abraham and his ancestors did – on the same land – leading flocks from one tiny patch of dusty, desert plant-life to another. And since the Dead Sea is completely, well, dead, I wondered how they had water to drink.
The answers – cisterns and wells.
Cisterns and Wells
Large, cavernous, clay holes in the ground, cisterns catch and store rainwater for future use.
Deep wells tap into underground springs so that fresh water can be scooped up by buckets.
As we traveled the desert roads of the Holy Land, we witnessed over and over again the ways God met the needs of His people. And we would read passages from Scripture that helped us connect what we were seeing to the metaphors God uses to communicate His ways to us. For example:
“Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the LORD, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
Jeremiah 2:12–13 ESV
This passage is packed with cistern and well language. The people of God had failed to choose Him.1 And how easy it is for followers of Jesus to do the same. We try to do everything in life by our own strength – we start carving out our own cisterns instead of depending on God’s wells of living water. We get so busy, so overwhelmed that we don’t even notice that the cistern we’ve dug is cracked, all our effort leaking out the other side. So we stay dry, empty, lost in the desert of self-striving.
With such exertion, we can lose sight of ourselves. Like the Israelites of old, we forsake God, going after what we think will fill us, satisfy us.
O Lord, the hope of Israel,
Jeremiah 17:13 NLT
all who turn away from you will be disgraced.
They will be buried in the dust of the earth,
for they have abandoned the Lord, the fountain of living water.
We can march along in the desert of our own making without even realizing how cracked and parched we’ve become. Like the Samaritan woman who ran right into Jesus at Jacob’s well near Sychar, we dip our buckets into the wrong waters. We look for validation and belonging and identity in all the wrong places.
To the woman living in sin, ostracized by her own people, forced to draw water in the heat of the day alone, Jesus shows up. He starts asking questions – and saying really profound things that unsettle her. And us:
“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
John 4:10
To each and every one of us who have lost ourselves in all the doing and hurting and confusing, Jesus still shows up. And He speaks to all the withered spaces that we assumed were long dead:
“Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”
John 7:38
And like the woman who had been hiding her True Self for so long that she didn’t know who she really was anymore, when we pause at the well of Living Water, we discover that our Savior knows us better than we know ourselves. Our jaws drop in amazement as excitement bubbles up with the truth – this Messiah knows everything we’ve ever done (John 4:39). He knows us.
Known and Loved
My friend, I may not know what your desert looks like or what cisterns you’ve tried to build for yourself, but here’s what I do know. God, our Living Water, sees it all. Is aware of it all. And stands at the ready to extend to you what you actually, truly need. Himself.
When Jesus invited the Samaritan woman into conversation, He wasn’t setting out to make her comfortable. Rather, He was asking her to take a leap of faith – “to wrestle with her past, her shame, her false religious beliefs, and her identity.”1 When He asked for her to receive Him as her Living Water, He hoped she would lay down all she thought she knew about herself and, instead, drink deeply of His truth – because He knew it would transform her!
When we begin drinking from Christ’s living water, rivers flow through the deserts of our hearts. And we start seeing ourselves differently, “no longer unknown or nameless.”1
We may feel as colorless and dusty as those deserts of actual Israel, but God promises to spring up and spread His water of life over our souls. We may think no one sees or cares or knows us, not really – but the truth is, God knows.
- The God who formed us, constantly searches us in such a way that He always knows everything about us (Psalm 139:1).
- Our Father who loves us cannot miss seeing us – we can’t flee from His presence or hide in the dark from Him (vv.7,12).
- The One who is everywhere all the time knows our every thought, even before we do (vv.3-4).
- Our Creator who made us in His hiding place, saw us even in our mother’s wombs (v.15). He. Knows. Us.
God never leaves our side. He comes to us, just as Jesus did the woman at the well, to reveal to us all He knows about us – not out of judgment but so we can be transformed by His living water. Made whole. Made new. Loved.
Known.
Father God, we marvel at the way You speak to us – how You use deserts to help us better understand our dried up selves, how You talk of cisterns to connect our self-striving to our utter emptiness. And we thank You for always seeing us, always knowing us despite our efforts to hide ourselves from You and others. Lord Jesus, it’s incredible the way You took the Father’s words about living water and used them to speak life into the nameless woman at the well. We are beginning to see ourselves in that woman; we recognize our need of all the NEW that You are offering to us – new life, new hope, new hearts. We now see how all our efforts to make our own way through life pushes us into deserts, those places where we no longer recognize ourselves. We grasp that all the energy we exert trying to build our own cisterns doesn’t get us what we actually need to live as our True Selves in You. Holy Spirit, we need You! You ARE the Living Water that pours from the Father’s heart, that flows from Jesus’ love into our dry souls. We ask that You would continue speaking to us, telling us what the Father would have us do. We ask that You would do a deep and holy work within us, allowing streams of life to do the new work of the Father within us. And we ask that You would constantly remind us of just how much we are loved and known by our Father. In Jesus’ name, amen.
(Inspired by Isaiah 43:19; Jeremiah 2:12-13,17:13; John 4:10-15,7:38,16:7-15; and this article2)
*The conference I’m referring to is the New Room Conference, annually hosted by Seedbed. My pastor-friend is JD Walt. Many moons ago, JD was one of our associate pastors when we lived in north Houston. Don’t you love how God leads us when we let Him!?
Resources: I love sharing with you the books, podcasts, articles, and anything else that has inspired, encouraged, or taught me. These are humble offerings with no expectations.
- 1 – Paige Allen, He Knows Your Name,^ P.192 – about this passage in Jeremiah: “God was accusing the people He loved of creating spiritual cisterns as they hoarded past encounters with God and chose religious performance rather than true connection with Him. They were settling for a form of God, surviving rather than thriving, and God wanted more!” Also, pp.193,197.
- 2 – This Got Questions article helps connect all the dots about Living Water, including the way the Holy Spirit is now the Living Water in us!
- 3 — This podcast episode with Jennie Allen and Christy Nockels is worth the listen!
- 4 — Seedbed’s “Wake Up Call” is part of my daily rhythm with the Lord and has been for about a dozen years. Not saying that to toot my horn, but JD’s. He writes posts daily. He gets real. He challenges. He encourages. And he has a gift of writing with both truth and grace, Spirit and Word. And when you LISTEN to him, it’s just a bonus — daily hymn and all. 🙂
- On our Hidden Identities playlist, Ellie Holcomb has two songs that slide right into this week’s topics so perfectly it’s almost as though she wrote them just for us! First, check out her song, “Living Water,” because it’s an anthem that reminds us that God, as our Living Water, fills us and renews us. (BTW, the lyrics on Spotify are completely wrong…). Then, her song, “Where Can I Go,” is simply Psalm 139 put to music. It’s an amazing way to soak in the truth of Scripture. We. Are. Known.
- What would YOU like to read about in our next issue of The Abiding Life newsletter? Reply in the comments below or email me directly. Be sure to subscribe here if you’d like to receive future issues.
Rhythms: As my newsletter’s title infers, we seek to develop an abiding life in this space — a place where we can get informed but also be transformed as we learn to abide in God’s presence throughout our days. I like to think that developing rhythms is one way to aid us in our desire to become more Christlike.
- As we lean into the process of learning more about ourselves — our true identities in Christ — we are going to step into the spiritual practice of REST. When we strive from our own strength, searching for truth or success, hope or validation, we just wear ourselves out. There’s no rest when we drink from our own cisterns, not to mention the water gets stale and rotten. We want Living Water — fresh streams that flow into our desert-like hearts and bodies.
When Jennie Allen interviewed Christy Nockels on her “Made For This” podcast (season 7, episode 6), Christy spoke of ‘true rest’ as coming from trust in and surrender to God. She also said we must learn how to live for God AND from God. 3 Ooof. Let that sink in.
This week, let’s take time to just be with God. No asking for anything. No striving from our own strength. Just being in His presence. If you need some words to help settle yourself (and we all do), I offer JD’s prayer of consecration that he and his readers/listeners pray together every morning:
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, We belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.4
- And while it’s not a spiritual practice or rhythm, I invite you to share this site. This is such an important topic that I want as many people as possible to join us here. Together we’ll find support and encouragement and the simple truth that we are not alone in our struggles.
Featured Photo by Pavlo Semeniuk on Unsplash.
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