Evening at the Well
Do you expect God's steadfast love to show up only at the big turning points of your life, or would you dare to ask for it in the middle of an ordinary errand?
“He said, Yahweh, the God of my master Abraham, please give me success today, and show kindness to my master Abraham.”Genesis 24:12
Abraham is old, and he sends his servant (the chapter never gives his name) back to the land of his relatives to find a wife for Isaac. It is a long journey, from Canaan north to Aram-naharaim in upper Mesopotamia. The servant arrives with ten camels at the well outside the city of Nahor "at evening, the time that women go out to draw water" (Genesis 24:11). In that world the well was the town's daily meeting place. Drawing water was hard, repetitive work, usually done by women and girls in the cooler part of the day: a jar on the shoulder, down to the water and back again. Nothing about the scene looks holy. It is dusty, tired and routine.
And there the servant prays: "Yahweh, the God of my master Abraham, please give me success today, and show kindness to my master Abraham." The word for "kindness" is hesed, the loyal, covenant-keeping love we have been following in this series. It is love that keeps faith with a promise, kindness that does not quit when it would be easier to walk away. At Sinai, God declared his own name as abounding in it. Here a servant simply reaches for it on someone else's behalf, trusting that God's promise to Abraham is solid enough to lean on beside a village well. Before he has finished praying, Rebekah comes out with her jar on her shoulder (v. 15). Later he will bow and bless the God who "has not forsaken his loving kindness and his truth toward my master" (v. 27). Hesed, it turns out, travels. It shows up at evening, by a well, in the timing of a young woman's chores.
Most of our lives happen at the well, not on the mountain. Commutes, grocery lists, the meeting that could have been an email, the third load of laundry. We tend to save our prayers about God's faithfulness for the crisis or the milestone, as if steadfast love were kept for special occasions. The servant's prayer quietly questions that. He asks for success "today," for this one errand, and he asks it on the strength of a promise made to someone else. What would it mean to believe that God's covenant love is already at work in the plain hours, in the people who walk out with their water jars at just the right moment? And what might we miss if we only look for God where we expect him to be?
Think about an ordinary task waiting for you this week. What would it look like to ask God for his steadfast love right there, and for whose sake might you ask it?
Lord, God of Abraham and our God, your loving kindness does not wait for the big moments. Meet me today at my own well, in the errands and conversations that seem small. Teach me to pray for others the way this servant prayed for his master. Open my eyes to see your faithfulness when it walks right up to me. Amen.