“Jesus is so different.” I found myself thinking. While many of us, even well-meaning Christians disdain “sinners” and would hold ourselves far away from them, Jesus doesn’t do that. Oh, let me throw all that away, and get back to why I was thinking that.
I know there was a time I felt I had been stabbed emotionally when I went to a Christian at prayer meeting when we divided up into twos to pray and was met—she wouldn’t even look at me—with the words: “Just put your hand on your heart and ask yourself what sin you harbor there.” Then she got up off her chair, moved elsewhere and would not pray with me. To this day, I have no idea what she was accusing me of. Pride? Prayerlessness? Laziness?
But there was the woman at the well of Sychar who met Jesus of Nazareth (John 4). He didn’t get up off his chair and move elsewhere when she approached; He actually went near her when He knew she lived with 4 men before the man she was living with—and then He asked her for a drink of water. I doubt seriously he said she was a prostitute as I have heard some preachers do!
My mother told me it once scared her to think that God could see everything in her heart. But then, she realized it was a God that saw everything and loved us anyway, not like the person who wouldn’t have anything to do with you if you have some sin in the heart, but He’d come and ask you for something just to let you know He really did want to be with & talk with you.
The usual reaction, when a person finds out somebody has taken a candid picture of him is, “Oh no!” But it wasn’t that way with the woman at the well! She ran into town, telling the people, “Come! You’ve just got to meet this man! He knows everything about me!” That would make most people say, “Don’t listen to a word he says!” But she sounded so excited, they had to meet Him.
Are WE like that? Do WE meet people, find out the worst about each other, yet find ourselves the best buddies on earth? Or do we do the routine of get-up-off-our-seat-and-go-to-where-the-purer-saints-are? Jesus didn’t do that with the woman at the well.
And she left her waterpot, saying,
“I have met a man who told me everything I ever did!”
