My granddaughter lives in a dry climate, and is a fanatic at ‘staying hydrated,’ even at four years old. My confident granddaughter thinks she ALWAYS knows just what she needs. Recently, she was uncharacteristically cranky while we were playing at her favourite park. She couldn’t articulate why. (She tried a granola bar and refused a nap.) But my daughter — her mama— knew. That four-year-old was just thirsty, and a few gulps from her princess water bottle did the trick.
There’s a woman in the Bible who had the same problem—sort of in reverse. She thought she needed water, but she actually needed something else.
In John 4:4-42 we meet an unnamed Samaritan woman on a mission for water. She was attempting to meet her daily physical need for water at the city well. The woman at the well thought she needed hydration, but Jesus saw what her desolate life truly needed—salvation. So Jesus broke social barriers to interact with her, revealing Himself as the Messiah, and offering her “living water.”
Like most of us, this woman didn’t know what she truly needed. As I’ve done so many times, she came for something physical and immediate when she needed something spiritual and eternal.
In illness, in anxiety, waiting for someone to return or waiting for someone else’s decision, I come to God with a specific, practical request. A resolution, a healing, a homecoming. Who better than me to know what I need?
That woman at the well and I aren’t so different after all. Our deeper thirsts are often at first unnamed. Not knowing what we need, we can both be willing to settle for the familiar, over the fulfilling.
The woman forgot what she came to the well for (she even abandoned her jar!) because she found something incomparably better. When Jesus meets our real need, it changes not just our internal state but our direction and purpose. We often abandon what we thought we needed in the first place.
But first, we have to trust that He knows our need better than we do.
Are you leaving your prayer’s fulfillment to God, or insisting on a certain answer?