The COVID-19 pandemic may inspire a lot of writing. However, that's not the subject of my new book, published March 27, 2020, and coming soon to my website. I wrote it "under the influence" of forced quarantine. Here are some excerpts:
This book is about a man, a woman, and a dialogue in the Bible that most people misunderstand....
In Old Testament thinking, “living water” is running water, fresh, clean, coming from a new gushing spring or down a snow-capped mountain. Or it is precious rain from heaven, which came in Israel after many dry months every year. The opposite is not “dead” water, but motionless and possibly stagnant water. In the arid Middle East, sometimes the cistern water is the only game in town; but wouldn’t everyone prefer the living water? What human would rather look at infested puddles compared to a rushing stream?
I think our modern, Western mind seeks to pin Jesus’ words down, take them apart and analyze them, but He used a holistic, Middle Eastern image. What would a person who is constantly reminded of the scarcity of water and their own thirst want more than anything else? To have their fear of thirst and drought be removed; to have a daily, reliable abundance of fresh, running, clear water; and to be finally and unalterably satisfied. What does a person who feels unloved, rejected, broken, shamed and guilty, unaccepted and unacceptable want more than anything else? For those senses, those realities to be removed.
She was not afraid to talk to this man at the well. She didn’t understand much, so Jesus made it practical. When she changed subjects, He didn’t let her. He continued with her in loving persistence and did not to let her leave the well satisfied with her wrong ideas.
Jesus announced a new way here. The old was over, or soon would be. What the Samaritan woman and her neighbors understood and practiced, this tribal, ethnic basis of worship, is over. The new true worshipers are not divided by such things, blood and soil, genetics and genealogy and geography.