It’s time for a drink!

I am not sure where your life is at as you read this. It maybe be springtime where all is alive. You can sense new life, see the colours, smell the flowers and hear the birds singing. You can feel or are enjoying the birth of something new.

Perhaps you are in the middle of winter. So much is going on. It may seem like you can’t get a break at all. Problems seem to come one after the other, some of which with no solution in sight.

But for some it may well be a mix of both. You are trying to navigate through life with it’s joyful and challenging moments. You may be stuck and seem not able to take a step forward. You may feel like you are running on a treadmill racking up so many kilometers and loosing those calories but as you look around it is the same old scenery.

It may still be that you are in midst of the most challenging moment in your life. Those old problems that you have swept under the carpet seem to keep coming back but this time with much greater force wanting a resolution and decisive action because many are affected but you may not be ready or afraid to make or even you may still be awaiting another outside interference to decide for you.

Or perhaps you are stuck in addiction, in that old repetitive sin that seems to remind you every day that you are weak and helpless, that you are human and imperfect.

Wherever you are in your life at the moment, I hope you know that you are not alone. Perhaps you feel like no one is near you and no one really understands what you are going through. Yet wherever you are in your life, whichever season, rain, hail or shine, you have an open invitation to the “poor in spirit club”.

This club is not an elitist club for VIPs that have certain gifts or talents, or are on a certain salary or are famous or have racked up points or even are of a particular class. This club is for those who are willing to admit their needs and realise their predicament and weaknesses and come poor as they are to Jesus.

This is an invitation to take off those masks that we wear, and come with all of our desires, fears, uncertainties, moments of joy, happiness, success, failures, with those old weaknesses and those decisions that have been forever procrastinated, with the pains of yesterdays, the hopes and anxieties of today and the promises of tomorrow. To come with our indecisiveness and complex nature which we still don’t understand.

Simply, to come as the Samaritan woman did in her thirst, searching for the living water that will satisfy her unquenchable thirst. Coming where many before her came to the well, at high noon, off-peak, afraid of onlookers searching for what she is yet to find, that deep encounter of love that will reveal to her, her deeper self and paradoxically as she grows in that awareness she will come to know Jesus at a deeper level.

In her poverty she comes. In her weakness she comes. Transparent and perhaps trapped in a cycle of unhappy marriages. She comes as she is, doing what she has done so many times before. But this time she is even poorer and perhaps more bankrupt than ever before. Yet with courage she comes, in her poverty with no strategies, ideas or solutions, rather only with her thirst.

At the time of her deepest thirst and tiredness which is usually the time of our greatest need and our deepest weakness and vulnerability when we feel uncovered and naked, Jesus mirrors her feeling, he too is tired and asks for a drink, as if our thirst for that deeper love awakens in us an awareness of God’s thirst for us. Make no mistake, it is God who takes the first step ready to fill our innermost povery with water that will never make us thirsty.

But the well is deep and there is no bucket. But my problem is big and almost nearing the impossible, how will I get through it? What will I do? How long will it take? Who do I go to or ask? So many questions, we still have. Yet another sign of our poverty and deep thirst and nakedness.

Yet paradoxically this is the most opportune time to come to well, when you are tired and spent in order to encounter Jesus, to lay it all down and spend time with him. To let him in so that he can reveal more of yourself to you so he can set you free. To allow him to reveal more of your poverty to you. To stand naked but without shame in front of the one who became poor for you, who loves you unconditionally and layed it all down for you.

It is when we can stand naked and still be loved not judged, when we know our poverty is held in love, when our thirst is understood at its deepest level, it is only in this encounter with Jesus that real transformation occurs, that we are really free. And this can only happen at the well, where the lounge of the members of the poor in spirit club is located.

I think it’s time to go to the well. It’s time for a drink!