Waters gushing up to life

Last summer, on our first afternoon in Wales, Tracey, the girls and I went on a hike. I cannot even remember how we got to the place, but we drove up a very narrow path, up a mountain; so narrow a road that we had to find a way to back up when we met another car coming down. We parked near a waterfall that splashed down a windswept hill. There were very few trees around. We decided to climb, on that chilly day, up the hill, wondering where the water came from. We finally arrived at the top and, on one side, were the ruins of an old mill of some sort, a fun shell of a thing from time gone by. But what took my breath away was a very serene, glassy, and shallow little lake that ran off down the mountain toward our waterfall below. We had found the beautiful source which was, in fact, fed by water from the surrounding mountains and hills, but it felt like a place of origin for something quite stunningly beautiful: a waterfall.

Jesus said to the woman at the well, the woman who had had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband (John 4:1-14): "Those who drink the water that I give will never be thirsty. The water that I will give them will be a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." The word in Spanish for fountain, fuente, is also the word for source. How divine and blessed does it feel to know that we worship the savior who is, for us, the fountain of God's love, the waterfall that leads us to a God of infinite depth, power, grace, and hope (the source of our salvation). We must sometimes climb the mountain of Christ's teachings, following the stream of His crucifixion and the truth of Resurrection, if we are to discover the God of our understanding, the One who gushes up in us, through the mercy of Christ, into a spring of love, hope, and life everlasting.