Have You Met with Jesus at the Well?
A chance encounter can change your life
The Samaritan woman? You know, the one from the Jesus at the well story? We could be great friends. I picture us meeting at Starbucks…
Hurried, face flushed, she places her Venti nonfat caramel macchiato on the table where I’ve been waiting, wondering why she’s late.
“You’ll never guess what happened to me this morning,” she’d say. “I met a man who knew everything about me. I can’t explain it. He knew the details of my past and present without me saying a word. He spoke and I walked away changed.”
“Yes, I know Who you’re talking about. I know Him too,” I’d answer.
We’d be great friends. And boy, would we have some stories to swap. Yes, indeed. Not the bourgeois ugly stories of our past. Why bore each other with those? Instead, we would share our glorious encounter with Jesus. She’d describe what it felt like when Jesus spoke, asking for a drink, and her amazement when this stranger revealed her darkest secrets.
So similar is my encounter with Jesus. Alone, ashamed, and broken, He beckons me to approach, pointing to a mirror reflecting what no stranger could know about me. Shifting my eyes from the mirror to Jesus, I stand awaiting shame and condemnation. Instead in His eyes, I see something unfamiliar and life-giving. I see GRACE.
If He had not revealed the soiled reflection in the mirror, would His love have creditability? If He loved me only because He did not really know me, would that love matter? The power of my grace encounter comes from knowing that even with secrets revealed, He loves me. Jesus silenced the nagging, gnawing words in my head that screamed “you are unlovable!”
Like the woman at the well, I’m told to go and sin no more. And like her, my heart’s desire is to do as He says. Will I succeed? Yes, sometimes. Will I fail, yes, too often. But, when I do, Jesus will be there, at the well, asking for a drink. My prayer is that I will always be willing to serve Him, whatever He may ask of me. My gratitude for His Grace is undying.
Jesus Talks With a Samaritan Woman
“Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John — although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)”
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
“I have no husband,” she replied.
Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you — I am he.”
Is there someone from the Bible you would like to have a coffee date with?