Living Water

Every morning we wake up around 6:30am (sometimes earlier), have breakfast, and then start the chores of the day. The very first task that needs to be done is one of the most strenuous tasks. You wouldn’t assume this to be all that difficult, but fetching water for the day is actually a form of heavy physical labor. We are living in the hottest part of Malawi and our home sits on top of a hill that overlooks the villages below. Every morning we have to take buckets down the hill, make our way through one of the villages, get to the well, pump out the water, hike through the village again and make our way up the sand hill back to home. And it doesn’t stop there. We have to go back down to the well and keep on repeating this process until we have all the water that is needed- not to mention the countless number of trips we make continuously throughout the entire day (even as I write this I still have 200 more liters I need to go get that I haven’t been able to get yet… literally 200 liters).

Now that we have established a piece of the physical labor involved, we have to take everything else into account. Everywhere we walk in Malawi, there is high danger of poisonous snakes, and even more poisonous spiders, so we have to watch our every step (oh the poisonous spiders…) Also there are many villages using this well, so we are all sharing the same tap. What does this mean? It means that every time you go to the well, you have to wait until all of the other African mammas who were there first have gotten their multiple buckets of water filled; and more often than not, we help them pump the water because it gets to be pretty tiring.

Now, in saying all of this, I do not say any of it out of complaint. In fact, I was painting this little picture to let people see the beauty in it. I know the mammas down at the well because of the time we spend there. And as I am waiting to get my buckets filled the first time around, I am playing with the village kids- bamboo sword fighting, dancing, piggy-back riding, eating mangoes with the children in the Malawi heat, chasing the donkey that we sometimes take with us to help carry more water… We laugh with the mammas and just genuinely spend time with one another. The language barrier doesn’t matter. Kindness is an action; it cannot be contained by words alone. I was thinking about how difficult it is to get water here, and how I can easily just turn on the sink to get fresh water when I am back at home. But if I didn’t wake up early every morning and go get water while living here, the simple fact would be that I wouldn’t have any.

But how many more relationships am I building by this little setback? How many children’s lives am I now a part of because of how often I am at the well? How much stronger am I because of this discipline? How much more am I shining the light of Christ that is within me because of this daily chore? Every time we walk through the village nearest to the well, we walk past a witch doctor’s hut. It has come to the point that the witch doctor let us know that we are not welcome to walk past the line he has made in the sand around his home because the Holy Spirit living in us has actually been blocking the witch doctor from connecting fully to the dark spiritual realm (Now, this was actually before we even knew that we were walking past a witch doctor’s home in the first place. This goes to show just how powerful the presence of the Holy Spirit living in us is). Just a little background on witch doctors: one girl who came here a while back had to be sent home because she had her hair cut here and the witch got a hold of the hair and was able to perform dark curses over the girl and use her hair in spiritual rituals. The power of the witch doctors here is very real, but just not as powerful as the light of God. Every time I think about the fact that the witch doctor had to actually draw a line in the sand to let us know not to get too near because of the light we bring (the witch’s words, not mine), I have to laugh…. Like a line in the sand is going to keep the light of Christ out. I will gladly keep going to the well throughout the day just to keep shining. The power of Jesus is only getting brighter and brighter in that little village, and a line in the sand cannot keep that out. This isn’t just a story about the journey of fetching water. This is actually a story just about water. This is the story of a different kind of water- living water. And this living water is powerful and it will never run dry. This is the water that Christ provides.

“…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.”