Tips for Life
by Alan Bailey
Every day of our lives we use it. In fact, we are mostly made of it. I believe elephants consist of 70% of it. Yes, we are talking about water. Where it’s plentiful, we wash everything including ourselves in it, drink it, and grow our crops with it. And you can think of many other uses we make of water.
Where it is not plentiful, life is made harder. In fact, as we all know, without water we die. Earth has plenty, considering the size of the oceans. Other planets that we know of don’t seem to have any.
Yet there seems to be an unequal distribution of it among the peoples of the world. Millions carry water around with them every day. Bottles of water generate sales worth billions of dollars a year. Yet some others are struggling to find water that’s clean and drinkable.
Nature, also, seems a bit fickle. Some areas go without a good fall of rain for years while other places are flooded.
If you have it, be thankful. How good it is to swallow down some cold water on a hot day and to have some pouring over your head. It’s a blessing — almost a luxury. It can only be imagined what it must be like to wander in a blazing desert looking for water. As the body dehydrates, delirium increases. The craving for water fades as the system closes down. Then a shrivelling corpse lies inert in the sun. In time it will be white bones in the glaring light, testimony to the fact that life cannot exist without water.
A notable conversation
A man sat on the side of a well in the hot Middle East. A woman came to draw water up in a bucket and carry it away. He asked her for a drink and this started a conversation that has gone down in history. There was an amazing change of direction when he said that he had water for her that would quench her thirst forever. This was hard for her to understand and perhaps hard for present day readers to understand.
His words were ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’
Life that never ends is like a stream of water that goes on and on. People everywhere are thirsting for a new kind of life — a new quality of life. So many thirst but do not find. The woman in the story had tried many ways to find what her heart craved. Jesus knew that and made the offer of a completely satisfying answer to her need. The offer stands today. Many have found by experience what it means to tap into the eternal, to find their inner thirst quenched, to discover that they need to look no further. Having Him means having endless life.
Christ came for the purpose of giving us life. Our existence had been affected by the pollution of sin. Spiritual death held sway. His death and resurrection brought the possibility of life without end. By faith we can make it our own.
‘Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.’