My wife and I were both in graduate school, had part-time
jobs, and a weekend ministry in a little church in rural Kentucky. As summer
approached the issue of Vacation Bible School arose and somehow we convinced
the church to do an evening VBS – despite the “we’ve never done it that way”
initial response.
I was taking first year Hebrew, a decision that might not
have been among my best, and Vicki was taking some class required as a part of
her graduate degree in music. We both were in class, worked a few hours in our
part-time jobs, Vicki was practicing for her masters organ recital, drove to
Kentucky in late afternoon, did VBS, drove back home, and got ready for class
the next day.
Friday night, sometime around 9 p.m., VBS was almost over.
It was the “best VBS we’ve ever had” said one of the “we’ve never done it that
way before” folks. We were both dead tired. One of the men in the church
suddenly came up to me and said, “We are out of water.” First of all, I didn’t
know you could do that in the US – be out of water – and second of all, why was
he telling me.
The church had a mobile home next door to the building and
we often spent the weekends there. We were planning on doing that on this particular
Friday night. But there was no water.
A family in the church told us we could come over and shower
and get some water to bring back with us for coffee the next morning. The man
who first told me about the problem said, “We will have the cistern refilled in
the morning.”
“Cistern?” I wasn’t sure what one was, much less aware that
was the source of our weekend drinking water! Growing up in the low country of
South Carolina where water was just a few feet below ground level, I never
imagined that the best approach to running water in this part of Kentucky would
be a cistern.
Early that Saturday morning, I heard a truck backing up to
the church building and curiosity got the best of me. By the time I got
outside, they had pushed back a cover to a huge cement cistern on the back of
the church building – something I had never noticed before. As the cistern
filled, I noticed all manner of bugs, leaves, and assorted debris floating to
the top. Eventually there was what looked like the carcass of a long-since deceased
Mocking Bird! The water truck guy took a net and “cleaned it out for me.”
Even though this was long before the common availability of
bottled water, I don’t think we ever failed to have some bottled water for
drinking and cooking on the weekends after that.
As Jeremiah begins his explanation, on behalf of the Lord,
for why Israel is in such deep trouble with God, he says:
“Be appalled, O heavens, at
this,
be shocked, be utterly desolate,
declares
the Lord,
for my people have committed two
evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for
themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water.
(Jeremiah 2:12, 13, ESV)
I never read those words without thinking about that Mocking Bird
carcass in the cistern on the back of a little Kentucky church building. It
reminds me of how foolish it is to walk away from a fountain of living water
hoping to drink from a cistern that can hold no water. I suspect this great prophetic text could
have been in the mind of Jesus when He told the woman in Samaria “The water
that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal
life.” (John 4:15)
So the question I am asking myself – and hoping you will ask yourself –
at the beginning of a new year is simply this: “Where are you getting your
drinking water?”
Springs or cisterns?
A little later Jeremiah, still speaking about Israel’s forsaking of
God, will say, “They were not ashamed at all, they did not know how to blush.”
(Jeremiah 6:15) That sounds an awful lot like our culture right now – and it
probably reflects our seeking after empty cisterns rather that fountains of
living water.
So - the question: springs or
cisterns?
