Drink

Day Seven - Life doesn't always go as planned. I'm sure that you know that. Let me give you some examples from my recent days....getting bitten by a dog, slicing my finger open at book club the other night while trying to serve my dessert, touching my eye after just cutting up jalapeno peppers, setting the fire alarm off with my excellent cooking and filling the house with a blue haze, buying tomato plants and leaving them outside to freeze the very same night, and the list could go on. Yesterday Elle asked me as I had my head in the sink with water pouring over my jalapeno eye, "Why does stuff always happen to you?" I replied, "I'm starting to wonder the same thing." All the things that can and do go wrong in my everyday life could drive me to DRINK!

And it does. Let me explain. For as long as I can remember crazy, random stuff has happened to me. (As it does for everyone. I'm really no different.) Sometimes all that crazy stuff can get me down. It starts to wear away at the fabric of my sanity. That's when I know that I need a drink and it also clues me in that I haven't been drinking enough. You may be thinking: "Man, Lisa, sounds like you have a bigger problem that just a few minor incidents....you're an alcoholic!" No. I'm really not. The drink that I'm talking about is water, living water.

Jesus met a woman at a well one time. She had lots of issues. She had been through a string of men, and was likely kind of shunned in her community. I don't imagine that everyday life was real peachy for her. She was at this well outside of town alone. Probably because she didn't have any real companions who would want to walk with her. Enter Jesus. They talk. He asks her for a drink. She is in awe that he is talking to her a woman and a Samaritan; both of these things would be points against her. Jesus basically tells her that if she knew who he was she would be asking him for water! My favorite words of Jesus in this story are these: "Everyone who drinks this water (the water from this well) will get thirsty again and again. Anyone who drinks the water that I give will never thirst - not ever. The water that I give will be an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life." Wow! The woman is blown away. She does ask him for the water that he offers and her life is changed.

This is the water that I drink. When life is weird and has my head spinning, I go to the source of Living Water and I drink. That may sound strange but I listen, I read, I stop feeling sorry for myself and I let the 'stuff' that has been holding on to me roll off. There is peace in the middle of life's weirdness. I'm not sure what I would do or who I would be without that.

("Is anyone thirsty? Come! All who will, come and drink, drink freely of the Water of Life!" Revelation 22:17)