Every now and then, when I get confused about how to "draw a picture of God" for others, either in what I preach or in how I live, I find myself turning again to some familiar portraits Jesus painted of God.  It is a good discipline to remember that, every time you see Jesus, you are seeing, as the scripture says of the Christ, "the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being."  (Hebrews 1:3)  By the way Jesus lived and in every word He said He was drawing a picture of God for us.

I don't know exactly why I find myself drawn to this story in John 4 this week about what has become commonly known as "the woman at the well."  Perhaps it is in the wake of the church shootings in Ft. Worth week before last and the strange numbness I am beginning to feel every time one of those stories breaks in the news.  Or, perhaps it is in response to my feelings of impotence after having said to Richard Mabry for what feels like the hundredth time this week, "I'm praying for you and Cynthia," and so desperately wishing I could do more than just say that.  Or, perhaps it is my way of reacting to my anxieties about how powerless I feel to help so many people who are hurting in so many ways.

Like the man who came into my office the other day wanting help.  His body had been literally disfigured by the most bizarre tattoos.  He was expressing deep confusions I could not understand.  I listened for a while but when he asked me if I understood I had to say, "no, I don't.  But, I'll pray with you."  He left just as confused as when he came and I felt lousy for being so useless to him.  Or, the man who met Nancy and me just outside my office door Wednesday evening.  He was totally drunk and crying and wanted money for more.  What he really needed I couldn't give him.  At least not then.  And, every now and then, I just get to feeling overwhelmed by the fact that people all around me need more than I have and I don't know how to care for them in the ways they most need.

So, I find myself turning to this passage for the second time since coming to this pulpit.  You may or may not recall that I preached from it on my very first Sunday as your pastor.  It is one of my very favorite stories in all the New Testament because it is so full of the raw reality of life and yet, in the way Jesus responds to this woman, it is such a simple picture of caring in a way that makes an eternal difference.  Here was Jesus, not changing the tragic realities of this woman's life like I so often wish I could do for others, but showing what it means to simply care for desperately needy people.  It is a picture of caring I want to learn to draw.  An artistry that requires three essential disciplines.

The discipline, first of all, of choosing to linger where hurting people live.   From what we know at the end of this story, we can know that, at the beginning, Jesus knew this woman's story before she told it to Him.  He saw her coming a mile off, if you will.  John records that Jesus was tired, too.   No one would have known differently had Jesus just quietly slipped away and excused Himself because He was "tired out by his journey."  Jesus chose to linger where a hurting woman would pass.

One of the most difficult things about being a pastor is living with people's expectations.  People think we care.  And, we do.  The only problem is that we can't always care as much as some people would like and even as much as some people need.  There is always some distance between what people expect of us and what we expect of ourselves and what we are actually able to deliver.  It's really very difficult to care about everyone all the time under all circumstances.  The truth is that we only have so much to give.   And, we can be introverted and self-centered and we get tired just like everyone else. 

A line from a 60's youth musical, Good News, asked the questions, "Do you really care?  Do you know how to share?  With people everywhere?  Do you really care?"  Well, if caring is defined by always having both the emotional resources and the intense desire to share everything with all people all the time every-where no matter what then the honest answer must be "no."  Sometimes, it feels good to run and hide.  And, sometimes, just like Jesus did from time to time, we discover that one of the most spiritual things we can do is get lost for a while.  But, eventually, caring means lingering.  Even at the risk of letting the overwhelming needs of others rearrange our agenda.

When his eleven-year-old daughter was dying with leukemia John Claypool said that it was as if he had a sixth sense about those who came to visit him and his family as they stood watch over her in the hospital.  He could sense the difference between those who came because they were genuinely concerned and those who came simply because he was their pastor and they felt obligated.  (Claypool, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler)  Somehow or another people know when we are giving out of genuine compassion and when we are just paying off some perceived debt of obligation.  Many times, they are able to figure that out by whether or not we linger instead of excusing ourselves from an uncomfortable situation too quickly.  By whether or not we have time to just stop long enough to pray or share a cup of coffee or, sometimes, to exercise the second artistic discipline of those who sketch clear pictures of caring, learning to listen.

One day this week I met a man for an early morning appointment at a Starbuck's coffee house.  I stepped up to the counter and found that I have never been so confused in all my life.  All I wanted was a plain cup of coffee.  Ordering one of those at Starbuck's is no cinch.  If you want Llama Latte or Mongolian Espresso you're in luck.  But, just plain coffee?  Well, I stepped up to the counter and asked the young lady, "how do I ask for just a plain cup of coffee?"  She said, "you say, 'I want a plain cup of coffee.'"  So, I asked and a minute later and a dollar and sixty-nine cents lighter, I had what I wanted.

Caring people know that hurting people don't always know how to ask for what they need.  It would have been so easy for Jesus to get side-tracked by this woman's sin.  How many lovers?  How much adultery?  Believe you me, it mattered to Jesus.  Just like He knew her past, He knew His future.   He knew that it included an appointment with death that He would have to keep, in part, to pay the spiritual debt this woman was accruing through her inability to get what she needed from men in the way God meant for her to.

But, grace means that God knows what we're asking for even when we don't know how to ask for it in appropriate ways.  He knows how to listen beyond what we say to what we mean.  Listen to how He says it to her.  "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'give me a drink,' you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."  But, He knew she didn't know.  She didn't know who.  And, her life was proof she didn't know how.

Of late I have found myself praying this prayer, "Dear God, please help me hear what hurting people are saying even when they don't know how to ask for help."   Perhaps that would be a good prayer for us to pray as a church.  All around us, and even staring back at us in the mirror, is proof of a world that doesn't know how to ask for what it really needs.

Just yesterday I heard of a pastor and his wife (people I know very well) who were driving along when she got irritated with him and asked, "how is it that you sometimes won't give me an answer until I ask the question in the way you think is exactly right?"  I hear tell that the husband had no good answer but was humbled by the reminder that loving spouses don't make their mates ask a perfect question before giving a needed answer.  By the grace of God, may we never be a church where we make people learn to ask the question in the way we think most appropriate before we try to give them the answers they are seeking.  Caring means listening beyond what people are saying to what they need.  And, it means at least one more thing.

Caring means offering people an option.  Especially the option of faith in God.  Occasionally someone will come to me whose world is collapsing all around them.  To them, it appears that they are completely boxed in on all sides and that there are no alternatives to total despair.  I have found that, sometimes, good counseling, especially for an amateur like myself, simply means helping people see that they do have options to total despair.

This woman Jesus encountered would have been right at home in our world.  Sex for her had long ago ceased being reserved for the sacredness of marriage.  When Jesus asked her to call her husband she said, "I have no husband." Jesus already knew that and confirmed it when he said, "You are right . . . for you have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband."  Now, sexual intercourse was simply the course she chose to get what she thought she needed.  My guess is, she didn't even enjoy it anymore.  But, it was the only way she could get men to pay attention to her.  She had probably given up on ever finding relief from loneliness.  But, using her body the only way she knew how, at least she wouldn't have to be alone in her loneliness.

Whatever else this story tells us about God, it tells us that God is more interested in where people are headed than in where they have been.  And, that is why, at the end of five failed marriages and in the middle of one more adultery, Jesus offers this woman an option when He says, "those who drink of the water I will give them will never be thirsty."  Jesus asked her to consider the alternative of living from the inside out by drawing on a spiritual resource supplied only by faith in Him rather than, in self- destructive ways, expecting and demanding of people what only God can give.

Sometimes I get lost in how to help those who are lost.  I keep coming back to this story because it reminds me that, whatever else "evangelism" is, it is nothing more complicated than asking people to consider faith in God as an alternative to the course they have chosen without Him.

When I was a little boy most Saturday afternoons meant going to the movies.  In Brownfield, our parents thought nothing about letting us ride our bikes downtown to the Regal theater to watch a movie.  As long as we were home by dark, no one worried about us.  So, I'd hop on my Stingray bicycle with the banana seat and my buddies and I would make a day of it.  On the way home we sometimes stopped by the Farm implement store just to look around.  It was full of all kinds of interesting things.

One Saturday, while we were in the store, we came across a rack of cattle prods.   You know, those long metal rods with an electrical probe at the end.  Battery operated, they carry a charge powerful enough to make a five hundred pound bull jump when it gets stuck to his rump.  They have a way of making full-grown cattle do things they wouldn't do under normal circumstances.  That's why they call them "prods."  Anyway, my friend and I got to playing around with this thing and decided to try it out on each other.  The only problem was that we couldn't decide who should go first.  Who should be the prodder and who the proddee.  The whole time I kept noticing this group of men who were standing at a distance just watching us.  It took me a while to figure out why they were staring.  They wanted to watch the show. 

They knew that, no matter who got stung first, someone was going to light up and it was going to be a free show for them.  Adults, who should have known to warn us, they weren't about to say a word.  It was shocking, really.  They could have offered us an option by demonstrating the prod for us in safer ways.   But, they weren't about to give up their Saturday afternoon entertainment.   So, after a long debate between my friend and I over who should stick who, we . . . put the prod back on the rack and left the store.

It's one thing to stand at a safe distance and be shocked by all the things people do to destroy themselves when they don't know how to ask for what they really need.  It's another thing altogether to intervene in caring ways and offer them an option.  And, what people really need is the option that only a relationship with God through Christ can give them.  If we really care, we'll offer them that option.  We'll stop rushing through our routine as though our daily schedule was sacred and we'll linger where hurting people live.  We'll listen to what they are saying even if the way they are saying it is repulsive to us and nasty and tattooed with disfiguring kinds of self-destruction.

Only then, when we've done that kind of caring, will we have earned the right to ask them if they'd like to consider faith in God as an alternative to the way they are living.  Only then, will people who have never seen what God looks like be able to say, in the picture we've drawn them, that they have at least seen a glimpse of His face and know it to be a caring one.