The importance of water

I have been bathing in our kitchen sink for two weeks now as our single bathroom is being re-done (Yes, I am that slow). I use a portable step at the sink to get first one foot, then in the other under the tap; other gyrations are necessary to wash the rest of me and shampoo my hair.

The novelty wore off in a couple of days, but I am managing to refrain from bodily stench - and learning again how important water is. With one foot in the sink, I am reminded that I have clean, running water available in our little shack even if we do not have a bathtub at the moment (it is sitting in the front yard, freshly painted and wearing freshly painted cast-iron clawed feet, awaiting installation). Running, fresh water in a home at all would be considered a blessing in much if not most of the world; a bathtub with running water would be considered remarkable, and perhaps wasteful, in places where potable water is scarce.

I can drink water from the tap, I can wash my hands under the tap, with contortions I can bath under the tap, I can make iced tea with water from the tap, I can get water from the tap for boiling pasta; how wonderful is the constant availability of fresh, clean water!

Yet this kind of water - a requirement more important than food for life on this world - has little importance when compared to a different kind of water, the living water that is Jesus of Nazereth. The water He offers is eternal. Anyone who knows Jesus as Savior will never run out of this kind of water no matter where on this planet he goes, whether to Death Valley or the Amazon Valley, the Gobi Desert or the Mississippi Delta.

As Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4: 1-42), "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

Consider those words the next time you draw a bubble bath, or wash your car, or pay your water bill, or drink a glass of clean, fresh water - or wash your dirty foot in the kitchen sink ...