A Jar for Ten Camels
When has God's faithfulness reached you through someone who owed you nothing at all? And would you have recognized it as God's kindness if you hadn't been watching for it?
“Let it happen, that the young lady to whom I will say, ‘Please let down your pitcher, that I may drink,’ and she will say, ‘Drink, and I will also give your camels a drink,’—let her be the one you have appointed for your servant Isaac. By this I will know that you have shown kindness to my master.”Genesis 24:14
Abraham's servant has traveled hundreds of miles to Nahor with ten of his master's camels, looking for a wife for Isaac. At the spring outside the town, as the women come out in the evening to draw water, he prays for a sign. It isn't a random one. He asks for a young woman who, when he asks for a sip, will offer to water his camels too. Anyone who knew camels understood what that meant. A camel after a long desert journey can drink many gallons, and there were ten of them. Rebekah would have to go down to the spring and climb back up again and again with a clay jar on her shoulder, pouring it into the trough until the animals were satisfied. That is an hour of hard, wet, heavy work for a stranger and his beasts. The servant wasn't asking for magic. He was asking to see a certain kind of heart.
Then he says something striking: "By this I will know that you have shown kindness to my master." The word is hesed, the loyal, covenant-keeping love the Lord described when he passed by Moses on the mountain. The servant expects to see God's hesed toward Abraham in a girl's hesed toward a tired traveler. Heaven's faithfulness would come to him wearing sandals and carrying a jar. That is part of who God is. His steadfast love is not only something he declares from a mountaintop. He often keeps his promises through ordinary people choosing generous, costly, unrequired kindness. Rebekah didn't know she was part of a covenant story. She only saw thirsty camels and decided to do more than she was asked.
We tend to look for God's faithfulness in dramatic places: a sudden answer, an open door, a circumstance that lines up perfectly. Those things happen. But much of God's steadfast love arrives the way it arrived at that spring, through someone who gives more than the moment demands. A neighbor who plows your driveway before you're awake. A nurse who stays past her shift to sit with your father. A coworker who quietly carries the extra load the week your marriage is falling apart. It's easy to call these simply nice people, and they are. But Genesis invites a deeper reading. The kindness of a stranger may be the hand of a faithful God, keeping a promise to you that you'd almost forgotten he made. It also raises an uncomfortable possibility: that your own jar, and your own willingness to keep walking down to the spring, might be how God means to show his loyal love to someone else today.
Think of a time someone gave you more than you asked for, at a real cost to themselves. What might it look like to see that moment as God's faithfulness to you, and not only theirs? Where is there a trough near you that no one else wants to fill?
Faithful God, you keep your promises, and you often keep them through the hands of others. Open my eyes to recognize your steadfast love when it comes to me in a stranger's kindness. Make me the kind of person who sees the thirst no one mentioned and goes back to the spring again. Let my small, costly acts carry your faithfulness to someone who needs it. Amen.