Social rejection, separation, disconnection. It all feels like a death… a pain that cuts to the marrow. We’re born unto a mother, yet deep belonging does not come with the birth certificate. It is the same for us now as it was for the oldest of our ancestors. A lost sheep is always in danger apart from her flock… apart from her shepherd. We were never meant to walk alone. Safety is in numbers. And for all of time, being safe is what we crave.
Like wet clay laying upon the potter’s wheel, we’re born into hands that will do with us what they will. Vulnerable from the start. How will they form us? Will acceptance and love be the kiln in which we take our true shape? Each of our delicate selves, pulled from the same great lump of clay, must endure the perils of fragility. The sacred Mother held our shape and purpose in secret when we were yet formless. The profane misshape us out of fear, hardening this tenuous, tender vessel of ours.
Broken, and on the ragged edge of herself and her people, a Samaritan woman comes to draw water in the noon day heat.* No one would see her then. A ghost among her own. A broken shell of a former self. It was shame that pushed her out to the margins. Jesus comes near with his own thirst, weary from his journey. He asks for a drink. Social and religious codes forbids this. She resists. As he wades through her defenses, sharing about a bottomless well that holds healing water, a relationship is fashioned. What was broken is repaired… what was hard is softened… what was lost is found.
He cups his carpenter hands and brings the water to his mouth. Afterwards, he shakes them out, holding them in the same shape that formed the clay on his father’s wheel. He tells her that she can taste something new, drawn from a deeper well. This vessel within us is big enough to hold more than we could ever take. Dipped into the well that will never run dry, we hold living water as a chosen cup that can never, ever be broken.
–Jim Marsh, Jr., Bread of Life Church
