The woman at the coffee shop.

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 

but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed,

the water I give them will become in them a spring of water 

welling up to eternal life.”

John 4:13-14

Dear Me,

I see you in the coffee shop. You're on your second cup of coffee, drinking it through a stir stick.

You're absorbed in your tortured thoughts and your latest self-help book purchase, (something about self-esteem or living your best life now or simply not feeling like crap all the time) when the Methodist pastor walks in.

He has kind eyes. He cares about people. You appreciate him, mildly. You went to his church for a couple of years. But ultimately, you left because you were looking for a superhero, a super-heart, a super-intellectual who could answer all your questions and resolve all your conflicts and settle your anguish with a sentence or two.

They couldn't do that at the Methodist Church. They were (oddly enough) into Joyce Meyer and Beth Moore. They wanted louder, faster music. You'd been through that already and now you wanted old hymns and liturgy and, perhaps, a Gregorian chant or two.

“Where are you going to church these days?” the pastor asks, his kind eyes looking at you as though he really cares.

“Nowhere,” you say, a bloom of shame spreading from your neck to your face.

You've had five churches, your interior voice quips, and the one you're with now is not your church.

The pastor nods kindly, shares a thing or two about his family, and continues on his way.

You're like the woman at the well. Only you collect churches instead of husbands, your interior voice continues.

There is something true about the accusation.

Perhaps, even, it is a key of some kind, though you will mull it over for years before you get it.

You've given up on the Baptists, the Charismatics, the Methodists, the Presbyterians. You hung with the Seventh Day Adventists for a couple of years but could never get into all that sci-fi and vegetarianism. And now, you are hovering around the edges of Roman Catholicism, looking for something ancient, borrowing its stained-glass light, its intellectualism, its vast silences.

You like it because it's different; it doesn't remind you of your bad church experiences: the splits and factions; the abuses and distortions; the tight, impenetrable friend groups.

The songs are different. The books are different. The lingo is different.

Sometimes, on Sundays, you walk to the front with your arms crossed over your chest to receive a blessing. But you are skeptical as to whether or not this “blessing” means anything.

What you don't realize is that the answer is simpler than you think, and—as usual—you are trying much too hard.

The answer to your heart's question is yes.

Yes, Jesus Christ is still with you. Yes, He loves you. Yes, He is the Living Water, the Superhero, the Super-heart, the all-knowing, infinitely wise One.

Yes, He is waiting for you—in the wreckage of this world, in the ruins of His church, in the devastations of your life.

Someday, you will see the secondariness of the things you obsess over today. Someday, you'll see the churches and their people for the beautiful mosaic that they are. And you will see yourself arrayed with them, one of His shining ones, lit up from the inside by His love.

Talk Soon,

Jessamyn