The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (John 4:9, NIV)
The beauty of knowing what’s coming is that you don’t need to manage your expectations. Let’s just say this doesn’t happen in golf.
If the game really does train you for life, one of the most important lessons it teaches us is that we have to be ready for anything. A ball curving left will bounce right, tumble into a bunker that hasn’t been raked, and threaten to turn our good round into a disturbingly mediocre one—just that fast!
You may think that life doesn’t turn on the vagaries of a bounce here or there, but we have all heard the story of the person (maybe even a friend) who has been pierced in an accident then told by the doctor, “If that shard had been just a couple of millimeters over, I don’t know that we could have saved your life.” Most of our stories aren’t that dramatic, but if we trace the steps that have led to “chance” meetings or “perfectly timed” business deals, we know how fine a line runs between one outcome and a very different other.
Trusting that God knows what he is doing is the way for us to walk into the unexpected with lessened discomfort or fear.So we do not know what a day will bring—or where it will lead. Such was the case when Jesus sat down by a well in Samaria and blew the mind of a woman he met there and his gaping disciples as well.
As today’s verse from John 4 helps us understand, there was no social context in which it made sense that Jesus would ask this woman for a drink. For a Jewish man to drink from the cup of a non-Jewish woman was to cross every boundary. You just didn’t do that. Jesus did. And in doing so, he opened a door of conversation that only he saw coming.
This desperate woman, who had run from husband to husband in a culture where a woman could hardly survive without one, became an evangelist of the Messiah, and many in her village came to believe in Jesus. And his disciples, though surprised by his actions, did not challenge him. By now, they knew that he knew what he was doing.
Trusting that God knows what he is doing is the way for us to walk into the unexpected with lessened discomfort or fear. It leads us into new places to meet new people and tell them the old, old story.
—
Jeff Hopper
July 5, 2019
Copyright 2019 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
OTHER DEVOTIONS IN THIS SERIES
On Location 1: Gathering Together
On Location 2: Then and Now
On Location 3: New Ventures
On Location 4: Partners in Ministry
On Location 5: Making Connections
On Location 7: Helping Others
On Location 8: Stepping Out
On Location 9: Lifelong Learning
On Location 10: Tough Stuff
On Location 11: Learning Together
On Location 12: A Good Solid Why
On Location 13: Room for Reflection