Living WaterMuestra

Water can offer a new identity 

Jesus and the woman at the well — John 4  

Typical man, she might have thought when Jesus asked her for some water. In the ancient world, collecting water was women’s work — much as it is in many parts of the world today, like Zambia. 

Everything about her would have sent most respectable Jewish rabbis running the other way. Her ethnicity. Her gender. Her reputation. 

None of this deterred Jesus. One minute He was asking for a drink; the next, He was offering to give her “living water.” Imagine her shock!

In the exchange that followed, Jesus transformed the woman’s identity. He treated her like an equal, engaging in a lengthy conversation — the longest recorded dialogue anyone has with Jesus in the Gospels. He restored her dignity, refusing to cast her aside when the unsavory bits of her past came to light. 

As a result, she became one of the first evangelists … and living water flowed into her community.

After a trip to Zambia, World Vision communicator Kari Costanza wrote about meeting Nivesh, a girl who, like the Samaritan woman, lived on the margins: 

I have never encountered so many people who were so ashamed to be dirty as I did on a trip to Zambia. Mother after mother told me how they wouldn’t go to church — how they were either busy collecting water and couldn’t go, or feeling so dirty that they didn’t want to mingle with other people.

“When you come to school dirty, people laugh at you,” 11-year-old Nivesh told me. “They say, ‘You can’t even wash your own clothes.’”  

A lack of water … was denying these women community.

… On that night in town, Nivesh took her first shower. She sat on her first real toilet — her school doesn’t even have a latrine. She turned on a tap and water flowed. … 

The next day we saw Nivesh. …[she] was a new person … . She was clean and fresh. She now had a dream.

Nivesh was too dirty to feel like she had a place in her community. And the daily trek to get water kept her from school and even church.

Thankfully, World Vision is working to bring water and sanitation to Nivesh’s community. And Nivesh is beginning to see herself in a new way — like Jesus sees her. Like He saw the woman at the well.