The Story I Keep Telling

She has a very good story and it is six years old.

That is not a criticism of the story. It is genuinely good, and it happened, and she tells it well because she has told it a great many times, and it has the shape that a story gets when it has been told a great many times.

It comes out at the right moments. When somebody is discouraged. When a new person asks her about faith. When she is asked to say something at a women's thing, which happens about twice a year.

And she notices, now, when she is telling it, that there is a version of her at the front of that story who is not entirely the version of her in the kitchen.

The woman in the story is somebody things were happening to.

She was not doing very much in that story, actually, if you look at it. She was in a bad place and something arrived and it changed things. That is the shape of it. It is a story about being met.

And for about six years since, she has been the woman who was met, which is a lovely thing to be and is also, if it goes on long enough without anything else being added to it, a kind of address.

She has not stopped believing anything. She goes, she serves, she prays. Nothing has gone wrong.

She just has not got a second story, and she has started to notice, and the noticing has a low hum of something in it she does not want to name.

So let me ask you.

How old is the best story you tell about God?

She put the jar down and went

There is a woman at a well who has the most famous conversation in the Gospels, and everybody focuses on the conversation, and I want to look at the sentence immediately after it.

Jesus has just told her who He is. It is the most direct statement of it in the whole book and she is the first person to get it.

And here is what John writes next.

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.John 4:28 and 29

Notice the detail John did not have to include. She leaves the jar. You are carrying a good story and a heavy jar at the same time, and the Holy Spirit has never handed anybody an encounter to keep as a closing chapter.

Leaving her water jar.

Now, John is not a wasteful writer and that is not scene decoration. That jar is the reason she came. It is the entire purpose of the trip, and it is heavy, and she would need it, and she leaves it on the ground at the well.

Because something has become more urgent than the errand.

And then look at what she actually does with what happened to her. She does not go home and hold it. She does not wait to understand it. She goes back into the town, at whatever hour that was, and starts telling people, and the passage says many of them believed because of what she said.

The account we have of that woman is about seventy per cent what she did next.

Hear where you stand, six years in.

You are not a woman with a stale testimony. Scripture spends more lines on what she did after the well than on the well, and the Spirit has never given somebody an experience as a closing chapter.

And I want to name the low hum, because you already know what it is and you have not wanted to say it.

It is that you have become a person who describes rather than a person who does.

That is not a moral failure and I am not going to treat it as one. It happens because a good story is genuinely useful and people genuinely want to hear it, and every time it lands well it becomes slightly more the thing you have to offer, and after six years it is the thing you have to offer.

The word says power comes so that we will be witnesses, and a witness is a person who keeps having something to report.

Your jar is very well polished. It is still at the well.

And you are not a woman with a stale testimony. John 4 spends more lines on what she did after the well than on the well itself, and the Holy Spirit has never given somebody an experience as a closing chapter.