Gushing

 

This morning the water in my neighborhood stream is running freely. Bushes and branches are covered with another form of water: sleet that came in the night.
Water covers most of the earth's surface and permeates more than half of my body. The presence of so much water in us and around us makes it a perfect symbol for God's life that saturates us and our world. In chapter four of John's Gospel Jesus says, "The water that I give will become in them a spring gushing up to eternal life.
One of the times that I am most aware that I am more liquid than solid is when I go for my morning swim in the summer. As I glide through the water I am occasionally aware that the water in me and the water around me is one. I enjoy being part of the water, sinking, rising, moving through it. Sometimes, like Loren Eiseley, I feel part of all the places that water reaches. From our Lake it flows through two rivers before it joins the Ohio River and then the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.
Like water the same God is in me and in all that is good and beautiful in the world around me. That awareness comes at times in prayer, in a walk alone in the woods, in an airport crowd. The one God uniting me and the universe.