I was really arrested this morning with something I’d read from a sermon on John 13 & 14. I know that regardless of all the things that get in my way, and all the entrapments of life there is a part of me that is perpetually dissatisfied with all of it. No matter how much I am pulled by the desires of my mind and body, even regarding things that aren’t intrinsically evil or sinful, once I have tasted the fruit of those cravings I am left with a thirst for something greater. Jesus would call this “greater” thing “living water”.

The thing that is so ironic, looking from this side of the Samaritan well (John 4) is that when Jesus offered the woman “living water” He wasn’t offering anything but Himself. A meaningful encounter with Him IS the living water that He offers. And, as is His nature and makeup, meaningful encounters with Him don’t end, they are self-perpetuating experiences. Once you drink from His well, from Him, there is a simultaneous satisfaction and eternal desire for more.

This morning, Frederick Buechner put it so well, and considering he is almost infinitely greater with words than I am, I offer you this friends. May our throats, though satisfied eternally, be perpetually parched in the moment for one more blessed draw of the well that is Christ:

“You will seek me,” Jesus says, and no word He ever spoke hits closer to home. We seek for answers to our questions – questions about life and about death, questions about what is right and what is wrong, questions about the unspeakable things that go on in the world. We seek for strength, for peace, for a path through the forest. But Christians are people who, maybe more than anything else, seek for Christ, and from the shabbiest little jerry-built meeting house in the middle of nowhere to the greatest cathedrals, all churches everywhere were erected by people like us in the wild hope that in them, if nowhere else, the One we seek might finally somehow be found.
– Frederick Buechner