Wells, blessings and jealousy
We carry on with the journey in Genesis 26 with a series of thoughts arising from the story –
- When there is a famine, God tells Isaac ‘Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land where I tell you to live. Stay in this land for a while, and I will be with you and bless you.’ God reminds Isaac of the promise He made to his father Abraham. ‘So Isaac stayed in Gerar’. Simple. God speaks and Isaac obeys. Can it be that simple really? How hard must it have been to stay when the natural instinct of nomadic people is to move in search of food? How difficult must it have been to fight this survival instinct and stay put? Isaac must have had a hard time explaining that to those around him. Sometimes it is hard to stay put.
We would welcome a reason to move on, shake the dust from our feet and start something new. Being told to stay in an uncomfortable situation is as hard as the call to step out in faith. There have been many times in our troubled journey with Courtney where Andy and I have been brought to our knees, desperately longing for an end to all the physical and emotional abuse. Sometimes it has felt unrelenting; others unpredictable (I’m not sure which is worse – every word you say or action you take feels like treading on eggshells). We’ve prayed for a dramatic healing and transformation but it has not come. We have tentatively looked into our options and have found there are not any we feel able to pursue. God has been telling us to ‘Stay in this land for a while’ and whilst that can feel damaging to our family, our marriage, our home and us as individuals, we have seen God’s promise in action – ‘I will be with you and bless you.’ Just last night for example – Courtney had been going on and on about needing new clothes for this course she’s starting today and we couldn’t afford to get any right now after the week we’d had. Then she gets a text from a friend offering her a bag of clothes she has grown out of and it’s full of jeans and leggings and disco pants and a cool jumper (with a cross on the front – which I told her to wear today and then she can be reminded that God is going with her into this scary place!) – exactly the items she said she was short of! - v7-11: Isaac tries the whole ‘she is my sister’ thing which falls apart when he is seen ‘caressing his wife’. You really couldn’t make it up.
v12-33: all about wells and water and jealousy…….God blesses Isaac and his crops so much that the Philistines become jealous and fill in his wells. They quarrel over who owns the water until they manage to reach a sworn agreement. So first – blessing and jealousy. It’s hard to see God seemingly blessing someone else more than us. Sometimes faith seems to come so easy to other people and their children all seem to be growing up in their faith and their homes seem peaceful and harmonious and their kids are doing well at school and God seems to be answering all of their prayers and they are always at the forefront of God’s work ( I had a friend once say to me ‘I go to her for all the spiritual stuff and you are more down to earth’ – made me feel inferior and have a chip on my shoulder for years!). We get angry when ‘not nice’ people seem to lead successful lives and don’t get what’s coming to them. We hear conversations in the school yard that make us feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied and resentful – jealous basically. We don’t want what we have – we want their life. We don’t want the shitty hand God seems to be dealing us right now – we want the easy life they seem to be having. So we block up their wells – just by a tone of voice or slight hint of negative body language or snide comment to others behind their back or finding a way to undermine their project, we (probably not deliberately or even consciously) try to drag them down to our perceived level and ruin their plans and anticipate their fall from grace. We all do it – it is human nature – often without realising it. And the answer? Recognising it for what it is. Naming what we are actually jealous of to ourselves and dealing with that. If we are jealous that someone else has so much time to themselves to do what they want, then we probably need to make more time for ourselves. If we can’t stand everyone going on about their holidays, then we need to find a way to have a holiday. If we resent the blessings heaped upon others, then we need to count our own blessings, however small and buried in crap they seem to be. Get the picture? We are only jealous of what we value. Take jealousy as an indicator of what you value. And stop taking it out on the other person!
Same verses – the importance of water – water is life-giving. Everyone on earth has the right to clean, fresh water. So how is it that four thousand or so years later, we still haven’t got this sorted? All this progress and ‘783 million people do not have access to clean water and almost 2.5 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation.’ This is ridiculous, scandalous….we need to do what we can by supporting organisations such as Water Aid . We really do.- And then there’s the whole idea of wells being like wells of creativity and what we do to fill in the wells of creativity of those around us and what has been done to us over the years to stifle our creativity and what we can do now to unblock these channels – but I’ll leave that for Friday night when all local people are invited to an ‘Exploring Creativity’ session here at 730pm with established author and intriguing individual Simon Morden.
