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/
[Photo attribution: http://fxmedcenters.com ]
I keep leaving church and telling my husband it is OK what the Preacher preached but I live in the real world you don’t have the time and can’t do all the things he preached to us to do or not to do because I live in the real world where you have real life issues, problems that you HAVE to handle and can’t wait on what God is going to tell you to do.
I asked my Sunday School Teacher, who is a Doctor one day what he does when he has an emergency at the hospital, he is needed right then he doesn’t have time to stop and pray that patient needs help right now not in a few minutes after he has taken time to pray. I thought I have you now, now you will understand what I mean when I say we don’t always have time to pray first, I live in the real world, and his answer was, I am praying on the way to the hospital before I ever get to the patient. He does live in the real world, he is just in touch with God always not just when he needs to be but all the time in the REAL world. Unlike me and only trying to be in touch with God when I need Him or someone I love needs Him. I need to learn to walk in Gods world which is the REAL world and quit making excuses for myself and saying you can’t live in the real world and stay in touch with God all the time and you can’t if you aren’t staying in touch with God all the time in the REAL world.
Thank You Laura for bringing (Jesus was tired) to my attention and helping me to understand He does understand the REAL world He was here and lived it.
Thank God He still loves us anyway even when we are to blind to see or to understand He can make our lives easier and less stressful if we would only learn to live in His world the REAL world.