8th October 2017
I was struck by the words in a prayer during an act of Orthodox Worship I attended some years ago.
‘God pours out golden torrents of immortality in divine floods, producing a harvest for eternity. He gives drink to the thoughts of the faithful’.
I love the idea of God giving drink to our thoughts… quenching our parched, dry and dusty thinking with life giving water and making our faithful thoughts rise up above the ordinary in life, to flow in life giving streams… to quench and to nourish our faith until it can bear the fruit of an authentic encounter with God, an authentic life of faith, faithful encounters in our relationships and with the world.
We have a saying – ‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’… but perhaps ‘the grass is always greener where God waters it’. When God has been able to fill us up with his life-giving water we can drink from the well which God is constantly refreshing and which will constantly revive and enliven us… if we let it.
Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the water well ‘Everyone who drinks from this well water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them, will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become a spring of water in them, gushing up to eternal life.’ (John 4: 13 – 14)
With the woman at the well, we say ‘Lord Jesus, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty again’ (John 4: 15 altd.)
Revd. Janine Atkinson