Water from a Rock
When the desert is real, the provision doesn’t always make sense — and that might be the point.
This is the third in a series of Lent reflections from my sermons during Lent. Each week during this season, the stories get stranger, the expectations get more upended, and the God we meet keeps showing up in places we wouldn’t think to look.
One of my toxic traits is that I’m hesitant to take on something I’m not pretty sure I can accomplish. That doesn’t mean I don’t get in over my head. That definitely happens. The trick is I get in over my head without realizing it.
There was the time I had to call my neighbor Jeremy at 9:30 on a Saturday night to help me fish an electrical line from a switch to a fixture because some of us look at the box in Home Depot and think, “How hard could it be to install a bathroom fan with a Bluetooth speaker?”
The answer is: pretty hard if you don’t have the right wiring in place.
There was the time my truck’s brakes failed while leaving a Carolina Hurricanes game, and I limped all the way to the corner of 54 and Miami Boulevard before running out of brake fluid around 11 p.m.
But the biggest what have I done moment happened about thirty months ago. My wife’s Subaru needed a brake job. The shops wanted $900. I priced out the parts at AutoZone: $350. “How hard could it be? I’ve done brakes many times.”
It turns out the answer is: without the right computer to communicate with the car and adjust the brakes properly, it is impossible. But that didn’t stop me from trying — or from doing several thousand dollars’ worth of damage that AAA both rescued me from and then billed me for.
So what about you?
Can you think of a time when you stood there, looked at the sky (or the garage ceiling) and thought, What have I gotten myself into, and how am I going to get out of this?
Your back was against the wall. You had no idea how you’d get out. And it was only then that the prideful, self-sufficient parts of you realized you were in a desert of your own making and you weren’t getting out on your own.
I think back to that Saturday night in the garage in October 2023, and I realize how privileged I am. Most of my “stuck” moments have been fixable. But there’s a moment in the book of Exodus where the stakes are life and death, and the feeling is the same, only magnified to an entire people.
In Exodus 17, the Israelites have been freed from Egypt, which is the thing they wanted. They’ve crossed the sea, which was the miracle they needed. And now they’re in the wilderness, which is the part nobody signed up for.
They’re thirsty. Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. They literally need water for themselves and their children. And they get to the place where we all sometimes find ourselves when we’re desperate and scared — they turn on their leader.
“Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”
The church has spent centuries calling this a failure of faith. But what if we paused to empathize? Their complaint isn’t irrational. They’re in a desert. There is no water. They didn’t pack for this. And the guy who said “follow me” seems to have only the concepts of a plan.
Sound familiar to anyone?
But God doesn’t scold them. God doesn’t invite them to deny their thirst and just “believe harder.” Instead, God tells Moses: take the staff, strike the rock, I’ll be standing there.
Not an invitation to start a gratitude journal.
Not a pep talk.
Water. From a rock. From the last place anyone would think to look.
God doesn’t remove them from the desert. Their circumstances don’t change. But something has been provided that wasn’t there before, from a source that made no sense, and it’s enough to keep going.
Moses names the place Massah and Meribah, “testing and quarreling,” because the people asked the question that runs through the whole biblical story: Is God here or not?
It’s the question we ask in hospital rooms and at kitchen tables and in the middle of the night when sleep won’t come. And the answer God gives isn’t a theological argument. It’s water from a rock. Provision from an impossible source.
The New Testament story picks up the same thread in a different key.
In John 4, Jesus is in Samaria, which, for a Jewish rabbi, is the wrong place. Centuries of religious and ethnic hostility kept Jews and Samaritans apart. But Jesus shows up anyway.
A woman arrives at the well alone, in the middle of the day. That detail matters. Drawing water was a morning task, a communal one. She’s come at noon to avoid the crowd. She needs the margins to stay safe.
Jesus asks her for a drink. She’s stunned. Jewish men didn’t ask Samaritan women for anything. They both knew that.
He doesn’t start with a sermon. He doesn’t open with theology. He meets a need, and it invites a remarkable conversation. She came for water. He offers her “living water,” something she didn’t come looking for. And somewhere in the exchange, something shifts.
She leaves her water jar, the thing she came for, and goes back to the people she’d been avoiding. Her message is simple: “Come and see.”
She came to the well to survive another day and left carrying something she didn’t know she needed, from someone who wasn’t supposed to be there.
I don’t have to tell you that life in 2026 is hard.
Many of us carry stress because of the love we have for our kids, of all ages. If we look around at what’s happened economically over the last several years, the things that used to give a sense of confidence and stability have shifted. Then we turn on the news and watch leaders take what we’d consider stable situations and make them unstable for reasons that remain fully baffling.
You don’t need to have wrecked your wife’s car on a Saturday night to want to look at the ceiling and ask, “Really? How much more?”
So where does that leave us? Maybe just asking: God, you’re going to get water from where?
But if we’re going to ask that, maybe we can have just enough faith to believe that something we need might come from a source we could never imagine.
We can remember that even if we want to stay on the margins, God might meet us there. And if we sense that God is going to meet us, we can open ourselves up because somehow, God knows what we need before we do.
And if we’re willing to open ourselves even a little, we might find that God provides both what we think we need and what we actually need. That’s good news.
I want to have hope today. I want us to leave with hope. And I want us to realize that maybe, looking at the sky, longing for a sign — or even just calling AAA — can get us what we need. Even if we can’t see it coming.
Given the world right now, that’s what I want to believe. And that is, I suppose, why it’s called faith. May we have faith in the God who brings water from wherever God wants to.
That’s the sign I need today. I suspect you might, too.