The Cistern I Dug Myself

There is a hole in the side yard of the Ledbetter place that a man dug with a mattock and a five gallon bucket over the course of thirty summers.

He started it the June he turned twenty two. It is round, because he took the trouble to make it round. It is lined, because he hauled the sand himself and mixed the mortar himself and went down on his knees on a board to lay it. There is a plywood lid with a hinge he set true, and a chain, and a galvanized bucket that has been replaced twice. When it rains hard the downspouts run into it through a length of pipe he sweated together in a shed in the middle of winter, and it fills, and for about eleven days in a good spring it is the finest thing anybody in that county ever made with their hands.

Then it goes down. It always goes down. There is a seam somewhere under the mortar that has beaten him for three decades, and every April he goes back in and works the crack and comes up out of there gray to the elbows, and every August the bucket comes back up with mud in the bottom of it and a sound you do not forget once you have heard it.

He is not a fool and this is not a story about a fool. That is thirty years of real work by a man who did not sit down, and there is not one line in what follows that is going to call it stupid.

A quarter mile north of the house, past the fence and up in a stand of beeches where the ground stays dark all summer, there is a spring.

His grandfather walked him up to it once. He was seven. The old man got down on his knees on the gravel, cupped both hands, and drank, and then made the boy do the same. It was so cold it hurt his teeth and he laughed with the water running off his chin. His grandfather said, this has been running since before this county was a county, and it does not care one way or the other what the weather does.

He remembers the cold of it in his teeth. He is fifty two now. He has never been back.

Not once, and not out of rebellion, and not because he decided anything. There was always the cistern to see to. April meant the crack. June meant the lid. September meant hauling. And the north fence is a quarter mile with a wet spot in the middle of it, and a man with a mattock in his hand at eleven in the morning is a man who already has a plan for the day.

This August it is down to mud again. He is standing in the yard with the empty bucket hanging off the chain, and the wind has come around out of the north the way it does before a change, and he can hear it if he stands still.

Water. Somewhere up past the fence. Running the way it has run this whole time.

The two evils, and the one thing that is not on the list

There is a sentence in Jeremiah that gets used as a stick, and it was never a stick.

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.Jeremiah 2:13

Read the list. Count what is on it. Two things: forsaking the fountain, and hewing out cisterns that will not hold.

Now count what is not on it. Thirst is not on the list. Wanting water is not on the list. Being dry in August and doing something about it is not on the list. There is not one syllable in that sentence that names the thirst as the trouble, and every preacher who has ever used it to tell a hungry person their hunger was the sin was borrowing the verse for something it does not say.

And notice who is talking, and how. My people. That is not a prosecutor. That is a man's voice when he finds out his own family has been drinking mud for years within walking distance of the good water, and the ache in it is for them and not against them.

You are not being indicted for being thirsty, and you never have been. I want that landed rather than implied. Jeremiah 2:13 names two evils and thirst is not either one of them, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old grieving line out of a prophet's mouth and gets it to a man in a side yard with a bucket on a chain before he can turn it into another accusation against himself.

Here is the other thing that sentence does not do. It does not say the cistern was a bad idea badly executed by a lazy man. Hewing is hard work. A hewn cistern is somebody's summer, somebody's back, somebody's craft. The trouble with a cistern was never the craft. It was that a cistern holds what falls, and a spring runs from somewhere else, and only one of those two keeps going in a dry August.

You have wanted real things, and you were right to want them. His word never once puts the fault on the wanting, and the Holy Spirit has not spent this decade waiting for you to be embarrassed about it.

Naming what you were actually after

Under every particular thing a person reaches for, there is one older thing, and it is not embarrassing and it is not a lesser want dressed up. It is the biggest want there is, and it has been wearing whatever clothes were nearest.

That is the naming this piece is for, and the naming is not an accusation. The thing you have been building was good. It was worth the years. It also was not the spring, and it was never going to be, and finding that out is not a punishment somebody arranged for you.

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.John 4:14

Jesus said that to a woman at a well at noon, in the heat, when nobody sensible fetches water. He did not open by correcting her. He asked her for a drink first, which is the last thing anybody expected, and then He talked about a well that runs from the inside instead of a bucket that goes down and comes back up.

You were made with a room in you that only a running spring fits, and the shape of that room is not a defect in your character. John 4:14 is written and it describes water becoming a well inside a person, and the same Spirit who carried that conversation through the noon heat is carrying it into a side yard where a man is holding a chain.

So name it plainly, and gently, and without one ounce of self contempt. What you were actually thirsty for was Him. Not instead of the good things. Underneath them. The good things were real and they were honest and several of them were the best work of your life, and none of them was ever built to hold what you were carrying to it.

You are holding a genuine thirst that has a genuine answer, and the answer has a name and a face. Jeremiah 2:13 calls Him the fountain of living waters, which is a title and not a metaphor kept at arm's length, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an old title into cold water in a man's actual mouth.