Living Water

I haven't swum for years, but that doesn't change the fact that I am part fish. I love the water. I don't like to just splash around and play in the water. I love to swim laps or better still to swim in a lake where you can just go and go and go without hitting a wall. There's a freedom in swimming that I imagine is something like flying. The water holding you in a gentle caress, stroking your shoulders as you rhythmically paddle on, and whishing a foreign ballad in your ears as you go is enchanting. For some reason when I'm in the water I feel one with the earth; one with God's universe.

But water is so much more than recreation. My body is 60% water! I love drinking water. I delight in a warm shower or soaking in a hot tub. Cleaning a kitchen would be torture without water and I can't even imagine how you'd ever get your clothes or dishes clean without it. I also look forward to walking in spring showers and feeling the rain tickle my face.

Maybe this love of water is the reason I delight when Isaiah says, "With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation" (Isaiah 12:3). Water is the life force both physically and spiritually. We are baptized in water. We drink the Sacramental water. We receive salvation from the Fountain of Living Water—Jesus Christ. When I used to hear that phrase, I'd think of a beautiful sculpted fountain spouting water into the air from its center and water spilling over its sides in cascades. But I have since learned that in Biblical days the word fountain referred to a source of something. So the Fountain of Living Water is the Source of Living Water. Jesus Christ is where it all comes from.

As I wash the garden soil off my work weary hands, I feel the water softly caressing my skin and it reminds me of the wells of salvation changing my soiled and tired soul into something pure and refreshed. Water is the source of all that is good.

Drink or Dig?

The prophet Jeremiah taught at the same time Lehi did in Jerusalem, but instead of taking him away to a promised land, the Lord instructed him to stay with the people and urge them to return to God. He obeyed but his efforts were in vain. The people refused to repent and brought upon themselves the very destruction Jeremiah and Lehi had warned them about.

At one point the Lord told the people through Jeremiah that they had committed two evils, “They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Reading this you and I get a sense of the meaning, but the intensity of it is lost on us—people who turn on a tap to get hot or cold water and then watch it run down the drain without a thought as to what is happening.

In Jeremiah’s day water was a valuable commodity. Recognized as absolutely necessary for human existence, water procuring occupied much of their time and thoughts. And once procured, protecting that water became equally as important. Every family member would be constantly reminded of the importance of water, and no one would dare waste water. It was much too precious. Water was life.

So when the Lord offers them a fountain (source) of living waters they should have rejoiced and drunk freely. Instead they rebelled and spent much effort to build themselves cisterns that broke and were unable to hold water which meant they went thirsty and died.

This is difficult to understand. When the Lord says, here drink from the living waters I’m giving to you, why would anyone turn their backs on that water and instead go to all the work of building and trying to fill their own cistern? It makes no sense, and yet repeatedly throughout the history of mankind we see people turn away from the life-sustaining waters offered by the Lord and instead spending a great deal of time and effort in an attempt to build leaky cisterns.

The question this makes me ask myself is, “Am I drinking from the Source or digging my own well?” Drinking is easy. Digging is hard. But the adversary does a very good job of confusing those two.