The Well

My parents live on a hill in the middle of rolling corn country. On their property is a house, a garage, a shed and a small chicken house. Over the years, a barn has blown over, smaller and less significant sheds have been torn down and thrown into the fire. There was also a large chicken house that gave shelter to thousands of chickens through my first two decades of life. During my sprouting years growing up in that house, responsibilities were given to each of us kids to prepare us to be self-sufficient later in life. Those duties included cooking and cleaning, washing dishes and of course...

Chicken chores.

Chicken chores were just that - a chore. Early rising, during our week to do the chicken chores, we would stagger out of bed after the cock crowed - usually my father waking us up with a cheerful little song that only early risers have and late sleepers detest - throw on whatever clothes that we had left on the floor from the night before and prepare to go outside to feed and water the needy little birds. My question when younger was: "Why can't they just feed themselves? There are plenty of bugs and worms out there. Let them work for a living!" My parents were unsympathetic to our cries. So, while it was still dark we counted steps down the hallway, avoiding the creaky stairs, grabbed the water bucket and headed out into the dark to feed and water the chickens who were feeling lucky because they were still sleeping.

Chicken chores weren't bad during the summer. It was warm. The birds were lucid and uncranky. There was some dialogue sometimes - I would greet them and prepare them for their demise in the fall, all the while talking about how much I loved buffalo wings and sweet and sour chicken. But winter was another story. Frigid temperatures, pitch-black building and blinding snow accompanied the chores. It was one thing to feed the chickens, but watering was another story. My parents, of course, are not on city water. They had to have a well drilled when they arrived on the farm. The well supplied water to the house but also to the yellow hand pump that resides by the chicken houses (or where they used to stand). The hand pump was the source of water for the chickens, and our own drinking water for that fact, but the water that issued forth was not the clean, clear drinking water that we have here in town. It does not contain fluorine or chlorine, whichever it is, that kills the bugs, but it contains a lot of iron. Getting a drink of water at my parents house meant chewing the water.

The old hand pump would take three pumps to get the water issuing out. I would hang a five gallon bucket under the spigot willing the water to come out faster so that I could go back inside where my hands weren't freezing to the pump itself. As I watched the water flowing into the bucket it was quite obvious that the amount of rust was substantial but not in relation to the amount of water itself. To drink the water at the farm meant dealing with the rust and being thankful for the water that we had.

I've been thinking a lot about that hand pump and that well recently. Mostly because I have been preparing for confirmation again this fall and, as always, we'll be delving into topics of small catechism and those precious words of wisdom "Was ist das?" What does this mean? And the response for all Ten Commandments? "We are to fear and love God..." We are to fear and love God. We are to fear God? What does this mean?

The word for 'fear' that Luther is translating from Hebrew to German is 'yara' which translated literally means 'a flowing' or 'a raining down.' This fear is a flowing in the midst of all the blessings of God a realization of something much deeper. In the midst of the water is always the power of God. The power of God is, as Paul says, "a consuming fire." One that consumes all of our selves - and so it is this that we fear, or maybe a better English translation 'be filled with awe in the face of a Creator that could crush, but never will - because his love is too great for that.' He has promised in Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the love that is in His son Jesus Christ.

So this fear is sprinkled in the midst of all the blessings of God. But often, we as humans, will only see the fear of God as running from, rather than a fear of running to. We look at a verse like Hebrews 10:26, 27 "For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries." We fear God who is ready to punish at the drop of a hat. Because we have sinned God is ready to rain down on us torment and fire.

We, I'll include myself and (I think I can) Luther pre-reformation, are so deathly afraid of God's punishment that we are like Adam and Eve hiding their bodies in the Garden of Eden. But, that is not how God operates in the world. God is love and love endures forever - everything else passes away. Even our sinful natures passes away in the consuming fire and purifies to reveal something greater and deeper. It reveals the purified soul, washed in the water of baptism, longing to find its place in the God who conquers even death.

And so we fear. Proverbs 1:7 says "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge..." Fearing God, or better yet, keeping God in ultimate reverence is the beginning of knowledge in figuring out how to wend our way through this life. So that when dark days come, the light still shines.

A friend of mine the other day was commenting, just like every one of us, "If God is all powerful, why doesn't he just stop the bad things happening to me." It truly is the unanswerable question - this problem of theodicy - why do bad things happen to good people. Why does my mother get cancer? Why do children die? How can a man of God do that to someone else? In some ways it's a bit like asking why the sky is blue and why is grass green. You can come up with some pretty good explanations but it still is in essence impossible to say. But (I hope this doesn't come across as Pollyanna-ish) mixed in with all the blessings of God is life itself is pain and grief and loss. If there were no times of tribulation, would we truly know what God's blessing is and how beautiful it is? If God were to sift the water of His blessing, and take all substance of grief, pain and loss out, would we truly know what his love means to us? Would we take notice of the beauty of life? My friend Tim, who has had cancer twice (and I ask God boldly to keep it away) said that until he had cancer, he wasn't truly aware of the beauty of a sunrise or the sound of his wife's breathing right after he woke up and she was still asleep. He never really grasped the significance of the cry of his child. That life courses through veins and awakes in us is a realization that the gifted-ness of this life is precious beyond measure. I am paraphrasing here - Tim would say that until he had cancer, he never recognized all of the good stuff - but happiness is realized in the moments of sorrow, pain and grief when the only comfort is to realize that God is holding us tightly in His hands.

The fear of the Lord is running to God and falling on our knees, not running away from God for fear of Him crushing us. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge that in the midst of the flow of life, in the outpouring of God's grace and blessings, we are not alone. We recognize the new life in Christ and revel in it's blessings and hold tight to the promises of God in the tough times.

So, I go back to the well, time and time again and remember. Just remember.