Pouring chocolate

A series inspired by sights in Kauai.
Heavy rainfall had turned the usually white-frothed Wailua Falls, near the east coast of Kauai, into thrashing muddy flood.  Still, it was beautiful and worthy of its “must visit” rating as we chose what to see in Kauai.  Most sources say it falls 140 feet; some claim it’s 173 high, others, less than 100 feet.  Despite warnings of safety, some dare to swim in its pool.  In ancient days, Hawaiian men would jump from the top of the falls to prove their manhood.  Today’s that illegal because of the danger.

In contrast to the roar and volume of the Wailua Falls, I recalled my study a few years ago of the water-pouring ceremony associated with “Feast of Tabernacles” in ancient Jerusalem.  Priests would process to the city’s “Pool of Siloam,” a reservoir created in King Hezekiah’s time, holding water brought 1,780 feet through a conduit hewn from rock from a small spring outside the city.  One day Jesus watched the priests go through their ritual, then shocked everybody by saying with a loud voice, “If a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”  The “living water” to which He referred, would be the Holy Spirit, to be poured out in magnificence at Pentecost to help Christ-followers (who include us today) to live out their faith with refreshing power. An old hymn by Horatius Bonar (1808-1889), Scottish preacher and hymn-writer, has one stanza that speaks of this:

I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Behold, I freely give
The living water-- thirsty one, Stoop down and drink, and live.”
I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life-giving stream;
My thirst was quenched, my soul revived, And now I live in Him.

This “living water” is what keeps us going when life sends us reeling with its muddy flows of destruction and disappointment.  In recent weeks, as I’ve prayed for troubled loved ones, another hymn has flowed through my heart like a life-giving, cleansing stream.  At times, just a few words of the chorus helped to settle my heart and trust God again:

Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er!
Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus! O for grace to trust Him more.

Hymn books name the lyric’s authors as Louisa Stead, who penned the entire verse in 1882. Born in England, she became a Christian at age nine and as a teenager felt the call to mission work. A revival meeting at Urbana, Ohio, confirmed that on her heart. But when she applied to go to China, the mission board felt her health was too fragile.  She married and had a little girl. But when her daughter was about four, her husband drowned trying to save someone.  Muddy waters!  But shortly after, she and her little girl sailed to mission work in South Africa! Widowed, alone, in a foreign culture—that’s when she wrote these lyrics. During her fifteen years there, she married again, but poor health meant a return to America where her second husband pastored a Methodist Church.  By 1900, her health restored, they returned to Africa, this time to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) as missionaries!  She retired in 1911 (about age 61) and died six years later. 

Of her last work in Rhodesia, she wrote in her journal, “In connection with this whole mission there are glorious possibilities. One cannot in the face of peculiar difficulties help saying, ‘Who is sufficient for these things?’ But with simple confidence and trust we may and do say, ‘Our sufficiency is of God.’”

Louisa Stead could have allowed her faith to be drowned in the floods of disappointment and a spouse’s death. But she trusted in Jesus, and “proved Him o’er and o’er,” living in the power of His living water.