What to do if you’re needy? Well, it is next to impossible to realize how addicted we’ve all become to something until we try stepping away from it. Be it: the noises of our music to drown out focus on important but trying issues, visual entertainment to create an escape through distraction, caffeine, nicotine, spending, charging, gossiping, bragging, smoking, drinking, fist fights and dirty talk. Suddenly that one thing commands a far greater importance to our living that we ever imagined or planned. Believing marijuana or cannabis is harmless or legal, respectively, works but not so much when your children embrace it as a part of their recreation. More subtle addictions creep into our lives like needing others’ approval, praise and recognition and needing always to be right.If you don’t do any of those things is your walk more “pure?” No one should become proud and self-congratulatory that we never made poor choices. All we need to do is remember… Detrimental in some way we all are needy and have obsessions, harmless or not, that drive our decisions and our lives. But being needy robs us of relying upon God, the giver of every good and perfect gift. Everything we count on outside of Jesus, to fill the thirst and hunger in our heart is sin.
Such was the life of the woman at the well, who seemingly managed to escape the obvious outward consequences of her neediness. In John 4, she replenished her household of water in the heat of the noonday. Until she met Jesus, she was needy, naturally thirsty as any human being would be in an arid geography such as where she lived. Her natural physical body needed water so she kept coming to the well, daily. In a non-judgmental way, Jesus showed her even greater needs in her life. Needs that a stranger in a chance meeting at Jacob’s well would not otherwise know. We read this text and misinterpret this woman with “low-living” and sin. Her multiple husbands could have been because she was a victim of the Leverite marriage customs of her day, having at the death of her husband to marry each of his brothers – to birth a male child for him. Maybe she was subject to the arbitrary and unloving divorce tradition.
Jesus offered this woman a chance of a lifetime – to be cured of her neediness. Having no further use for it, she left her water-pot right then and there. From ow on she is relying upon this “living water” to thirst no more. We can give our neediness and addictions to God as she did. It changed her life as it will yours.
