There is in every human heart an empty chamber which echoes. We attempt to furnish it with wealth, romances, fancy job titles, and little private kingdoms of our own making; yet the echo remains blaring. We are rather like children who, having been promised the sea, are content to paddle in rain-filled ditches. The tragedy is not that our desires are too strong, but that they are too easily satisfied with the fragility of the world's delights. 

We flee from God; maybe not always with clenched fists, but often with busy hands. We build, we acquire, we admire ourselves in mirrors held up by other people we so eagerly try to impress. And all the while there is a thirst—persistent, unembarrassed, and immune to flattery. We name it ambition, or love, or freedom. But it returns in the quiet hours as a dryness of soul.

Consider the woman at the well in the Gospel of John. At high noon, the Gospel tells us, an hour when respectable company is kept indoors, she comes alone to draw water. She has sought her portion of fulfillment in the arms of five husbands and now in a sixth relationship not sanctified by God. One can almost hear the echo in her heart sloshing louder than the water in her empty jar.

Yet there, seated wearily upon the stones of Jacob’s well, is Jesus. He does not wait for her to ascend into moral respectability. He does not send her away to tidy her history. He asks her simply for a drink. It is a curious God who makes Himself thirsty for us.

He speaks to her of “living water”—a spring that does not depend upon the depth of our wells nor the sturdiness of our ropes. She has come for something to carry home; instead, she is offered something that will carry her. And when He gently unveils the catalogue of her broken loves, it is not to shame her but to show her that He has traced every path she has taken to avoid Him—and has arrived there first.

We are all, in some fashion, that woman. We lower our buckets into relationships, achievements, and earthly pleasures, hoping at last to hear the satisfying splash. But the water drawn from such wells must be drawn again tomorrow. Only the water Christ gives becomes in us a refreshing spring.

The marvel is not merely that we seek substitutes; that is the oldest of human habits. The marvel is that Christ continues to cross Samaria for us. He passes deliberately through the territories respectable people avoid. He sits beside the wells of our compromise and waits for us in the heat of our own making.

And when at last we are startled into recognition, when we perceive that the Stranger who knows us entirely is not scandalized by our sins, our worldly water jars fall forgotten at our feet. We run, as she did, not to hide our shame but to proclaim our discovery: that God loves us still and he has not abandoned us. 

The heart’s chamber ceases to echo when it is inhabited. For the One we have been attempting to replace is the only One who refuses to be replaced—and who, in holy persistence, seeks us still.