This year the UK has seen its third driest July since records began in 1868, with just 35% of average rainfall. Many parts of the UK urgently need rain to secure water supplies and to help farmers with the harvest. Yet we have an abundant rainfall and take for granted access to clean and safe water from taps in our homes. Water is essential for life but for many people in the world it is scarce. It is estimated that 2.1 billion people (1 in 4) lack convenient access to safely managed drinking water. 106 million people collect drinking water directly from untreated rivers, lakes, and streams.

Jesus once met a Samaritan woman by a well. She had come in the middle of the day, when it was very hot, to draw water for herself and her family. Jesus knew the woman had had a very unhappy life. She had been married and divorced five times and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. Her life was very hard. Every day she had to come to the well to draw water and then carry it home.

As she walked to and from the well she must have often asked herself, “Is this all there is to my life?” and “Will I ever find true happiness?” Jesus knew her heart and her true need, which was greater even than her need for water. She needed to find meaning in her life and deep inner satisfaction. So, Jesus said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. 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.”

There are signs in Britain today that some people, especially amongst the younger generation, want to know more about Jesus and to find purpose and true satisfaction in their lives. As she came face to face with Jesus at the well that day the Samaritan woman came to know him and her life was changed. Horatius Bonar wrote a hymn about the woman’s experience, “I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Behold I freely give the living water; thirsty one, stoop down, and drink, and live.’ I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life-giving steam; my thirst was quenched, my soul revived, and now I live in him.”