Jesus Doesn't Need Your Bucket

I was reading the gospel of John in a different translation than usual, and came to chapter four, featuring the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well. Jesus, with a great attention-grabbing opening line, says that he can offer the woman living water.

And she responds, “But sir, you don’t have a rope or a bucket, and this well is very deep.”

For some reason, this struck me as hilariously funny. The Son of God is sitting right next to her, promising her an eternal source of life and refreshment, and she thinks he’s going to be stopped because he doesn’t have a bucket.

Except I realized I say things like that. All the time. And I actually know who Jesus is, unlike this woman.

Basically, I want so badly to feel like I’m in control that I’m okay with limiting what God can do.

Not seeing the connection to the woman at the well story? Okay, let me explain. My need for control usually shows itself in two different ways: first, I try to get God the right supplies on my own.

Playing Peek-a-Boo With Myself

Do you know why peek-a-boo is no longer a fun game for you?

If you answered, “Because I’m not a baby,” you’re pretty much exactly right. Brilliant, I know. So the real question is, why do babies find peek-a-boo so delightfully, giggle-inducingly fascinating?

Because, when they can’t see you for that brief instant, they think you disappear. That’s right. All you have to do to become a Houdini-class magician to a baby is hide your face with your hands. Enjoy it now. You will never be entertaining so easily ever again.

It’s a pretty big deal in child development. Mommy doesn’t cease to exist simply because she stepped into the hallway. Daddy is actually continuing to live and breathe when he’s not being monitored by the watchful eyes of the baby in the crib. That stunning revelation has a fancy psychological name: object permanence.

It doesn’t take us too long to realize that other people exist when we aren’t around. But, for most people, it’s much harder to deal with the idea that we exist when we’re not around.

I Am Always Right All the Time

I was going to title this post “How To Gracefully Be Wrong,” but there’s only so much hypocrisy that I can tolerate on a daily basis. As I’ve said before about a few topics, whatever I know about this subject, I know by not doing it.

I am, however, an expert at obnoxiously insisting on my own point-of-view, even when presented with other reasonable alternatives that I didn’t really listen to before repeating what I just said, but louder and with more gestures.

Thus the title.

Debating stuff is fun, and at college, it tends to happen a lot (or maybe this just happens to be true around the people I’m friends with). Despairing professors, take note—we really do think about important things sometimes. And there would be no need for this post if we all had similar opinions on important things.

But we don’t. Ever.

Learning the Hard Way

Sometimes, lessons you learn are obvious, timeless, and can be woven seamlessly into a brilliant allegorical narrative.

Other times, you just have to go over there by Qwerty and talk about what you learned today. Some lessons might not be very clear from just the story itself, so you have to spell it out. Which is what I'll be doing on Qwerty, the name I just gave the computer I'm working on.

Qwerty is not my computer. And this is not the blog post I intended to write.

The real blog post for today is sitting quietly on my hard drive, safe and sound . . . and out of reach. It was written several days ago and has been proofread twice, all set and ready to post.

Until a seven-year-old threw an exercise ball at my computer and cracked the display.

Just a typical day in my life with my host family here in Colorado. The poor kid ran away and hid from me the rest of the night. Which is a real shame, because he missed admiring the splintered cyan-yellow-and-magenta glory that is my computer screen.

You would think that there wouldn't be a lot to learn from this (except for the obvious "don't-make-kids-mad-by-doing-homework-on-your-computer-instead-of-playing-with-them"). But this one has more moral-of-the-story potential than a contrived sermon illustration or one of Aesop's fables.