God in Us — Our Bible App

Day 1 of 3: At the Well

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
—John 4: 7-12

This passage is familiar to all of us. Who has not heard about the woman at the well? I mean, who has not heard about the promiscuous woman at the well? The woman with multiple husbands and divorces. The woman who was shacked up and everybody knew about it.

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Her story is belittled to the men she was associated with. Belittled in her legacy, as just a misguided woman whom Jesus showed a little kindness to. Historically, the conversation leans more into warped ideas of her lack of “morality” or her “worth” and how Jesus restored those. Because how can she be a full woman, a full human, if we see her as defiled?

The task of womanism and womanist theology is to just see a woman. I’m charged with going back to the text to see that we really have no idea what happened to her previous husbands because the text never said whether she was divorced, if they were killed, if they left her for another family. This text has been riddled with rumors and assumptions about the woman with that WAP!

I am charged with seeing the full beauty of the woman at the well, because I do not weigh a woman’s worth and humanity with how she expresses her sexuality or how she survived in a culture that used her body as a commodity.

I am charged with realizing that no matter how messed up this world may BELIEVE she was, Jesus — at the well — saw what others could not see.

As we sit with this, what is your “well” moment? The moment you thought the world had turned against you, when you just couldn’t fit in the culture, when your outside appearance meant more to others than what was going on inside, when you had nowhere else to go but to the well.

We all have a moment where no one could see beyond the exterior. A moment where we came to the well like any other day and our life was changed. Not because of who we saw, but because of who saw us.

Whatever happens at the well, whatever the world thinks they can say about me, whatever the world thinks they see about me, whatever I have internalized and made myself believe about me, Jesus does not see. At the well, it's not salvation that is the game changer; it’s the unconditional love and acceptance. It is the confirmation of wholeness.

Daily, we are inundated with messages that may teach us we are less. We see statuses, tweets, and posts; we face microaggressions and watch news that reminds us effortlessly that we are not enough for this world. We learn the hard way that a misstep could be our end; yet here in front of God, we are reminded that this is fleeting. We are reminded that we have been whole. We are loved. We are full. We are enough. Our greatest gift is that, in our fullness, we matter — as quiet, loud, modest, immodest, as bold, soft, meek, and rambunctious — as we are.

You matter. Remember that you matter here and in eternity.

In the moments we forget, we just have to go to God at the well.

Amanda Harper

Day 1 of 3: At the Well

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