The Well He Never Went Back Down

He dug that well himself the year he took the place on, and he was twenty six and had more back than sense.

It is not deep as wells go. Twenty two feet, dry stone lined, and he did the lining himself with a man from the next valley who has been dead a long time now and who swore at him more or less continuously for a fortnight.

It has never once run dry. Not in the bad summer, not in the other bad summer.

And he has never been back down it.

Why would you. It works. You put the bucket down, the water comes up, and any man who spends his afternoons climbing down a working well is a man with too little to do.

Thirty years of drawing up.

Now here is the thought that arrived on him a few weeks back, standing at that trough with the bucket in his hand.

He does not actually know what is down there any more.

He knows what comes up. Clean, cold, always has been. But a well silts. Everybody knows that. The bottom comes up over the years and the inflow narrows, and the day you notice is the day the bucket comes up light, and by then it has been happening for a decade.

And then, because he is that sort of man, he thought the second thing.

I could say the same about what I am living on.

He has been drawing from the same place for thirty years. Same handful of things he learned when he was hungry and young and stupid. It has never run dry. He has never been back down.

If you know that, come and lean on this wall a minute. Nobody is going to hand you a scheme.

The question is not effort, it is what you are eating

There is a line in Isaiah that lands on a man like a hand on the shoulder.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.Isaiah 55:2

Notice what He does not say. He does not say try harder. He does not say you have not been working. He assumes the labor and the spending are already going on, and asks a completely different question, which is what any of it is actually feeding.

That is a question about food, not about effort, and it is asked kindly.

And notice what is on offer at the end of the sentence. Not sufficiency. Rich food. Delight. God is not proposing that you get your intake back up to an acceptable level. He is asking why a man is living on thin stuff when there is a proper meal on the table.

You are being invited to eat rather than told to work, and the invitation is open this morning. Isaiah 55:2 puts good food in front of a laboring man without one word of reproach, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the written word taste like anything at all, which means what you need is not more strength, it is a meal.

Nothing about thirty years was wasted, and nothing about your age is a lid

Now let me say the plain thing, because a man leaning on a wall with a bucket is perfectly capable of turning this into an accusation.

What you took in when you were twenty six was real. It has fed a farm, a family, and half a valley for three decades, and the fact that it lasted that long says something good about how deep you went at the time. Nobody is calling those years shallow and nobody is calling them wasted.

And there is no plan being issued here. No scheme with a name, nothing to keep up, nothing on the back of a door. This site does not do that.

You have not hit a ceiling, and there is no age in this at which the feeding stops. Colossians 2:7 speaks of being rooted and built up in Him, and both of those are still going on rather than finished, and it is the Spirit who does the building, so thirty years is not a lid on anything.

Here is the whole of what is being offered, and it is smaller than you are braced for. Not more reading. Slower reading.

When you were young and hungry you read like a man eating. Which means you went slowly, and you stopped, and you said things out loud in a cowshed with nobody there, and you went back over a line twice because it had caught on something. Somewhere since then you started reading the way a man checks a gate he knows is shut.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Psalm 1:3 says the tree planted by streams of water yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the same handful of things you have carried for thirty years and makes them food again, which is the one thing no effort of yours could have arranged.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The water in that well is not your achievement. You dug the hole. He put the spring there.