The Well Overflows

This past weekend was the Intervarsity grad student Fall Retreat for all of the Boston schools, and I was coordinating the worship team. I'm still not sure how I ended up as the worship coordinator, but I'm glad I did it because of how God spoke to me during the retreat. In short, it was a lot of work. Though I've played in a worship band a number of times, I'd never led worship, much less coordinated everything that goes into it - including putting together the arrangements, the songs, and getting someone competent to do slides. On Friday night, the first night of the retreat, God called me to start slowing down. I had faced some difficulty with transporting all the instruments up to Toah Nipi, and I was stressing out over everything. I hadn't even led the worship team in prayer before we started, I was so stressed out about what I needed to be doing. God did remind me that He was present, and over the course of the weekend, He showed me just how faithful He is to those who trust in Him.

We studied John chapter 4 at the retreat - the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. When Jesus starts telling the woman about the living water she should be asking him for, she asks him, "'Sir,' the woman said, 'you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?'" There are so many things to be learned from this passage, but one thing that one of the sisters shared at the end of the retreat really stuck with me. As she said, it should have been Jesus saying this to her. After all, He is the well of living water to which we must come. But we have nothing to draw with. As I reflect on this past weekend, how true it is that I have nothing with which to draw out the living water. I was trying to do everything on my own strength, but I have no strength of my own, and inevitably I would have failed. But as I started leaning on God and trusting on His strength, all of a sudden I realized that He was there and He was working in our midst.

How much more powerful is the strength of God than the puny might we have. And what is more, though the well may be deep to us when we rely on ourselves, Jesus doesn't just hand us a bucket and say Get to it. No, rather it becomes "a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The well literally overflows. How wonderful it is to know that when I come to Jesus, I don't have to rely on my own strength. His yoke is easy and His burden is light. This applies to all areas of life, from coordinating a worship team, to maintaining relationships, to getting a PhD. And though it's easy to revert back to working with my own strength, I always come back to the truth expressed by the words, "'Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus."