Let Down Your Bucket. It seems that there was a party of sailors who were shipwrecked and drifting in the Atlantic Ocean in an open rescue boat. They’d been drifting for several days, had run out of water, and were starting to suffer the agonies of thirst. They had no water to drink. It was scary and frustrating. ‘Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink,’ as Coleridge once wrote.”
A couple of days of this, and, finally, another small boat came within hailing distance. Our shipwrecked mariners cried out for water, begging for water. The new sailors on the scene yelled back, “Let down your bucket.” How cruel this must have sounded. They kept screaming for water, after two days of thirst. But all they got back several times was the phrase “let down your bucket”. “Throw your bucket down!”
“In desperation, one of the sailors threw the bucket overboard and pulled it back up. It was clean, fresh, sparkling water. For several days, these shipwrecked mariners had been drifting through fresh water and didn’t know it. Yes, they were out of sight of land, but off the estuary of the Amazon, which carries fresh water many miles out to sea.”
What’s the metaphor for you in this story?
You and I are surrounded by “riches” right now. The riches of life, the riches of God, the riches of relationships etc. They were in fresh water all that time, they just din’t know it. All that we are really thirsting for, all the things most people are thirsting for, are already surrounding them and even within them but like the sailors they don’t know it. After all, the “Kingdom of God is within, isn’t it?”
So what’s needed? Awareness, recognition, and action. Becoming aware of the love, joy, peace of God within us already and drawing upon it. How to draw upon it? Through awareness, recognizing it’s there, then turning toward it, allowing it, remembering it, trusting it, in gratefulness and enjoyment.
Perhaps this is what Jesus was trying to get at with the woman at the well as he talked about the living water that flows,. “Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.'” John 7:38
Let your bucket down into the unfathomable depths of God’s love and grace. Throw it down right where you are, in whatever you’re facing, in whatever feelings you have, throw it down and let God fill you.
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