Today made up for all the Sundays I spend rolling my eyes

It has been a long time since I sat in Sunday School with hot tears splashing down onto my blouse, a long time since I wanted to jump up with a joyful shout and point and say — That was for ME!

And I hadn’t even asked the question/said the prayer out loud.

We read the story of the woman of Samaria in John 4. Jesus is at Jacob’s Well, at the sixth hour (noon), alone (the disciples are in town buying meat), and a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. We know that since she was there in the heat of the day that she had a “questionable reputation,” and was either ostracized from going with the other woman or avoided them. We also know that Jews and Samaritans did not get along, that Samaritan women were considered unclean from birth, that by every cultural expectation and custom it was completely inappropriate for the Savior to even acknowledge her existence, much less speak to her.

Jesus taught her that He was the living water, that whosoever drank from the living water would never thirst again. She believed, and asked for this water. He told her to go and get her husband and she admitted she had no husband. The Savior commended her honesty and proved He was a prophet by telling her she had had five husbands and was now living with a man who was not her husband.

Jesus told her that He was the Messiah they waited for and she left her waterpot and went to her village and said, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?”

There’s a lot more we could speculate (maybe scholars know more?). For example, why had she had five husbands? Women could not initiate or obtain divorces back then, so she had either been divorced or widowed by men five times. I doubt (this is my bias about cultures where women cannot hold property or inherit or earn a living and are thus dependent on a man’s goodwill for survival as illustrated in the Ruth/Naomi/Boaz story) that she was living in sin by choice or design.

A couple of things are incredibly moving to me about this story. Jesus did not let cultural pressure stand in the way of doing His Father’s work. We are told to avoid the very appearance of evil, and yet the Savior was more often than not found teaching the lowliest, the outcasts, the culturally undesirable. In many cases the disciples remonstrated with Him when they found him eating with publicans and sinners, but in this case, they said nothing, though John suggests what questions they had.

The other thing is this woman: how Jesus treated her, not shaming her but teaching her a beautiful gospel truth, and how she reacted. She who had shunned or been shunned by the women of her village ran at once to tell them the good news, here is the Christ. The gospel changed her life.

In likening the scriptures unto me, I want to do what I know is right regardless of cultural expectation and custom, and I want the gospel to change my life.

In lighter news, I asked Lucy to get Molly a toy this morning, and she said she was already giving her the duck with breastpads:

Molly's duck

And this is what I mean when I say I teach my girls that modesty is important, but the rest is up to them:

Gray and pink striped hoody with a leopard print dress. Awesome.