Give Me the Living Water That Never Runs Dry
Are you ready to spend some time with the Lord? If you are new to mental prayer, we invite you to visit our guide on how to pray to learn more.
We begin Week 3 of our Sunday Lenten Challenge with this opening prayer:
Trust And Believe
Lord,
I believe you want to give me the grace to go deeper in prayer this Lent. Help me to be present to you so that I’ll intimately pray these next 15 minutes with my heart fully open and willing to receive that grace. Please help me open my heart and pray with more intensity. I want to be able to visualize myself with you so I can feel your presence more intimately in my life this Lent. Lord, give me the grace I need as I strive to complete these 6 days of Sunday Lenten meditations. I am choosing to take up my cross and humbly follow you all the way to Calvary and I want to do it with my whole heart.
AMEN.
Living Water That Never Runs Dry
Let’s contemplate the promises of God this Lent. What does it mean to have living water? To never thirst? Let’s meditate on these things in the presence of Christ and offer ourselves to Him in prayer.
Prayer to the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit,
I believe you are truly here and present to me right now. I desire to be present to you.
Thank you for giving me living water, even in my darkest moments. Help me recognize your voice and give me the grace to obey it.
You are faithful to me even when I am not. Please help me desire your living water. Do not let me forget the price Jesus has paid for my soul.
I am grateful to you for sustaining me through every trial in my life. Please help me thirst for your living water. I want to desire it and ask for it in prayer.
Breathe on me as I spend these next 15 minutes fixated on today’s Mass readings. Holy Spirit, help me pray with humility, honesty, love and affection. I want to grow in virtue and holiness.
Thank you, Holy Spirit, for every consolation, desolation, time of silence, difficult trial, and temptation of the evil one. I understand that you love me and that everything in my life happens by God’s holy will, whether it be divine providence or God’s permissive will due to my sin and negligence.
Please humble me as I walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem. Help me drink fully from your living water and do so with great love in my heart.
AMEN.
Say Nothing Just Take Him In
Spend 1-3 minutes in silence gazing at the Lord with love and gratitude, in a prayer of silent contemplation.
Make a Movie in Your Mind
Now we will contemplate the first reading. Imagine the taste of dust in your mouth. You’ve been walking for days through the wilderness of Sin, and your throat is raw, your lips cracked. Around you, the camp of Israel is unraveling — voices sharp with thirst, children crying, old men muttering that it would have been better to die in Egypt than to die of thirst here, in this barren place with no shade and no water in sight. You watch Moses walk forward, alone, toward a bare outcropping of rock, staff in hand, the elders trailing behind him nervously. You can feel the heat radiating off the stone even from where you stand…
Living Water from the Lord
Exodus 17:3-7
Here, then, in their thirst for water, the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “Why then did you bring us up out of Egypt? To have us die of thirst with our children and our livestock?”
So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? A little more and they will stone me!”
The LORD answered Moses: Go on ahead of the people, and take along with you some of the elders of Israel, holding in your hand, as you go, the staff with which you struck the Nile. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock in Horeb. Strike the rock, and the water will flow from it for the people to drink. Moses did this, in the sight of the elders of Israel.
The place was named Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled there and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD in our midst or not?”
Let us take a moment to reflect on the message in the first reading.
Even though the people were ungrateful, although they complained and protested—even though their anger was so great Moses feared they would stone him—God still helped quench their thirst. He answered Moses’ prayer.
Have you ever made a prayer in anger and expected God to ignore you, only to find a merciful response to your frustrated prayer?
It’s amazing to think that the people witnessed so many miracles in Egypt to help them leave their captivity, yet they still lacked trust in God to provide.
Be Completely Real
Do you trust God to provide for your basic needs? Have you been doubting a promise of God? Lacking faith? Complaining about your situation?
Be honest with the Lord. Self-reflect on your faith and whether you completely trust him to quench your thirst.
Let us continue our mental prayer with today’s Gospel:
Visualize Christ
It’s the sixth hour — noon — and the sun sits directly overhead, bleaching the stones white and pressing down without mercy. You’re resting in the shade near Jacob’s well, a wide stone mouth sunk deep into the earth, the rope beside it worn smooth from centuries of hands. Mount Gerizim rises in the distance, its summit marking the place Samaritans still climb to worship, apart from Jerusalem. The fields around you are still green, not yet gold — harvest is months away. You notice the disciples have gone into the town to buy food, leaving Jesus alone, tired from the road, sitting on the well’s edge. Then you see her coming — a woman, alone, at an hour when no one else would choose to draw water, carrying an empty jar toward a man who, by every custom you know, should not speak to her at all…
Living Water From the Well
John 4:5-42
So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon. A woman of Samaria came to draw water.
Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.
The Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
[The woman] said to him, “Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the well is deep; where then can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks?”
Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go call your husband and come back.”
The woman answered and said to him, “I do not have a husband.”
Jesus answered her, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’ For you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”
Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you do not understand; we worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth.”
The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Anointed; when he comes, he will tell us everything.”
Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking with you.”
At that moment his disciples returned, and were amazed that he was talking with a woman, but still no one said, “What are you looking for?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
The woman left her water jar and went into the town and said to the people, “Come see a man who told me everything I have done. Could he possibly be the Messiah?”
They went out of the town and came to him. Meanwhile, the disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat.”
But he said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.”
So the disciples said to one another, “Could someone have brought him something to eat?”
Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work. Do you not say, ‘In four months the harvest will be here’? I tell you, look up and see the fields ripe for the harvest. The reaper is already receiving his payment and gathering crops for eternal life, so that the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work.”
Many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me everything I have done.”
When the Samaritans came to him, they invited him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. Many more began to believe in him because of his word, and they said to the woman, “We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.”
Did you know that there are three references in the Old Testament about men going to the well to find a wife? Both Isaac and Jacob found their wives at the well, and so did Moses.
This is important, because it makes the scene between Jesus and the Samaritan woman much richer and more meaningful.
Just like his ancestors, Jesus travels to a foreign land and stops at a well. And like his ancestors, he meets a woman who comes to draw water. Ancient readers would immediately recognize this as a marriage story.
What Jesus offers the woman at the well — living water, poured out freely — Paul describes in almost the same terms: hope that “does not disappoint,” because God’s love has been “poured out into our hearts” through the Spirit. Both readings point to the same gift: something given, not earned, that quenches a thirst we couldn’t satisfy ourselves.
This water Christ offers is living—a spiritual covenant— much like a marital covenant. Through this encounter with Christ, the Samaritan woman seeking physical water is transformed by her encounter with the spiritual water she receives. In this way, we see something much greater than an earthly marriage proposal. We see Jesus offer participation in God’s eternal new covenant.
Are You Listening?
Have you ever considered your relationship with Jesus to be more intimate than with a spouse? In what ways has Jesus quenched your spiritual thirst?
Paul tells us that this living water isn’t something we drum up ourselves — “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). The same Spirit poured into the Samaritan woman’s heart at that well has already been poured into yours. You don’t have to go looking for it the way she once did, jar in hand, at the hottest hour of the day. You’ve gained access to this intimate grace through the sacrifice Jesus made for you on the cross.
Jesus, thank you for offering me living water when I didn’t even know I was thirsty. Help me stop drawing from wells that leave me empty — the ones I keep returning to out of habit, not love — and teach me to drink instead from you alone. When was the last time I offered you a prayer of silent adoration in thanksgiving for this gift? Let today be that day.
AMEN.