The River You Didn't Make

"Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink... rivers of living water will flow from within them... By this he meant the Spirit." (John 7:37–39, NIV)

You can often tell where someone has just been before they say a word about it. A person comes in from the cold and brings a little of it with them. Another carries the smell of woodsmoke, or the salt of a day by the sea, or the calm of a long time away. They are not trying to show us anything. Whatever they have been near simply comes in with them, and we catch it without either of us naming it. Something like that seems true of the people who mark us most. They carry something into the room that they never worked to carry.

On the last and greatest day of the festival, when the crowds were worn out and thirsty, Jesus stood and said it out loud. "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink." Would we have expected the invitation to be that simple, to come and to drink, rather than to strive, or to carry, or to become a spring ourselves? And then the promise. "Rivers of living water will flow from within them." Would we have assumed the river came first, or the drinking? John, who was there and wrote it down, lets one line fall gently after. "By this he meant the Spirit."

A river is not strained into being. It rises from a source and follows the low places without being told, and nothing downstream asks the water how hard it tried to arrive. Have we noticed how it simply gives what it was first given? The steadiness another person catches from us, on an evening we felt anything but strong, may surprise us as much as them. What reaches them was never the measure of our effort, only the overflow of drinking, again and again, from Him.

That overflow may be why certain people puzzle us. Long ago, two ordinary men named Peter and John, fishermen who had walked beside Jesus, stood before the religious leaders of their day. The leaders expected nothing from men with no training. Instead, watching them, "they took note that these men had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13, NIV). Not their learning, not their skill, but simply that they had been with Him. Would we have expected the council to land on that first? Something had flowed from within them that they never worked up. Perhaps what we encounter in them is not merely who they are. Perhaps it is Someone they have been living with. And the same may be true of the mark we leave, without noticing, on the people who share our ordinary days.

So we can loosen our grip on the effort. We were never asked to become a river for anyone, only to keep coming back for water. The people around us do not need a better version of us tomorrow. They need us to stay close to the One whose life keeps flowing, on the days we feel it and the days we do not. Stay with Jesus. He's the One who will make the living water flow. He keeps His promises.

Prayer

Lord Jesus, thank You for being the source I so easily forget. Teach me to keep coming back to drink from You, and to trust that Your life will reach others in its own time. Amen.