Tired? Jesus Was, Too

Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well.
John 4:6b

Surely I’ve read this passage many times over the years. But somewhere between pondering Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3 and moving on to His encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4, I completely missed this little phrase.

Jesus was tired.

Do you, like me, find it reassuring and comforting to know we serve a God who knows what this journey in this life is like? Jesus knows what it means to be weary. We serve a God who not only hears us and loves us, but who has been there.

When our Lydia was diagnosed with Type 1 (Juvenile) diabetes, we spent several days at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. After being moved from ICU to the floor, we began climbing the steep learning curve to figure out our new “normal.” Keeping Lydia alive depended on us knowing how to check blood sugar, calculate carbs, and administer the correct dosage of insulin. Stressful would be an understatement to sum up those days. As the nurse who was training us left the room one afternoon, my little emaciated 11-year-old (who had at that point not pondered a career path or college major) bolted upright in bed and said, “I’m going to be a nurse when I grow up – the person helping a kid figure this out needs to know what this feels like!”

We serve a God who knows what living in this world feels like.

We serve a great God – one who left His throne of perfection and majesty and peace and came to a world filled with pain and hurt, a world of tired bodies and trying people.

We can be grateful that we pray to a God who knows what being tired – and being rejected, being criticized, being misunderstood, misrepresented, unappreciated, unacknowledged, disrespected, disregarded (and any other word beginning with mis, un, or dis you can think of). He experienced it.

He is not only the God of up there — Beloved, He is the God of down here. He knows what THIS feels like.

The woman of God knows Jesus understands.

Here’s this week’s teaching lecture from John 4:

http://fbcsiloam.podbean.com/e/the-gospel-of-john-chapter-4lesson-4/

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