returning
We pull into the hotel parking lot at eleven o’clock at night, the light long since gone and with it, our energy. Adam and I sit in the truck and wait while Kevin goes inside to check in, and I stare out the window looking for stars, counting pools of electric light illuminating the parking lot.
Oh my, but isn’t it often a worn-out view, our eyes scanning the dark for light?
I stare at the building’s grubby outer walls, their pretense of stucco in three different shades, wondering what yellow they have actually been painted, what they will look like in daylight, because everything looks strange at night, and my eyes have grown so tired I can’t even read while wearing my glasses.
I wonder just how quickly we can haul our things inside and get to bed–in fact, in my mind we have already done so; I am already surrendering to the Sabbath of night–when I think of Jesus sitting down by Jacob’s well before that famous conversation with the Samaritan woman, how John’s gospel says he was depleted from travel.
She came loping toward that well with bone-dry thirsty jars weighing down her shoulders in the hottest part of the day, and Jesus, tired as He was, opened his mouth to ask her for a drink. It’s remarkable, really, that the living-water, the only real quenching for all our thirsting, begins by meeting her in the thirsty reality of humanity. There’s something to this, that the mutual sharing of honest vulnerability makes solid ground for building relationships.
Who needs to search anymore for light in the darkness?
I shift in my seat, stretching out my legs.
Jesus could’ve ignored her. Really, she would’ve expected it. Jews do not associate with Samaritans, and if that were not enough reason, he’s a man and she’s a woman. Human beings, brokenhearted as we come, tend to be better, anyway, at sheltering in self-protective silos than communing.
But Jesus is entirely unexpected, and He has my attention, has me turning toward Him with my travel-tired, me with the bone-thirsty jars hefted on my shoulders. Mine is really just another kind of thirst.
Ask, and I will give you the living water, He’s trying to say to me—I’ll give you rest, but another voice—my own—competes.
I’m not even sure this place will be clean. It’s a bit of a retort, my minding unwinding into a kind of un-minding, as I note that the real-life hotel has none of the polish of its online photos. I spy cracks in the asphalt beneath the parking lot lights where grass (weeds?) has sprouted like tufts of hair on a bald man’s head.
Something comes back to me from years and years ago, Kevin and me out searching for our first house, touring places with my dad, and he, opening the car door to follow us inside somewhere, says carefully, sometimes you can tell a lot about a place by the way it looks from the outside.
Maybe we should go somewhere else, that’s what I’m really thinking, though at this late hour, I hardly want to think it.
I am making arguments for someone who knows everything about me already, especially the way I wear my weariness, the crumbling way I complain when I’m tired from travel.
Meanwhile, I’m wonder what that Samaritan town looked like from the outside the day Jesus sat down to wait at that well. What was His weary-eyed view?
Jews didn’t really travel through Samaria, because they’d been raised to call Samaritans unclean, to believe them to be less valuable than the wild dogs who scavenged for food in the streets. But Jesus led His disciples there, to that town and to that well, to the woman, chose it rather than the long way around that they preferred.
But I feel, dramatically, I know, like some of my muscles are silently screaming—I thirst I thirst I thirst, and—in my mind I am reiterating—I really just hope for crisp white sheets and a fresh smell when we swing open the door to our room.
If you knew the real gift, you would ask, He’s saying, and in the back of my mind thrums the awareness that nothing even that seems clean is ever actually as clean as it appears to be, that we human beings have learned well how to whitewash tombs. I know this, that cleanness, in His view, has never really been about the outside of the dish. I remember God telling the Old Testament prophet Samuel that, people look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart, and I remember the way Jesus charged the crowds, stop judging by mere appearances, and I remember that the prophet Isaiah once said that all human righteousness is like stinking, filthy rags.
That famous Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well? I’ve heard it’s likely she went to draw water at noon to avoid the shunning stares of other women, women whose lives looked cleaner from the outside, maybe, though they clearly weren’t cleaner from within.
And here is the really astonishing thing, the thing that moves me, every time, to tears, that Jesus, who truly is holy-clean, moves closer to all of us instead of away. Oh, I’m so glad, that’s all I can think, that my uncleanness could never drive Him away from me.
An uncommonly hospitable man works in this hotel. I’m remembering now as I sit waiting that during our drive, Kevin mentioned he had called the hotel with a few questions, and that this man had gone, while Kevin waited on the phone, to look in the exact room reserved for us to be certain it would meet our needs. It isn’t what I would have expected, especially now, looking at this place from outside.
“We’ve got a room,” Kevin says, opening the driver-side door, shoving his keys down into his pocket, and at last, Adam and I unfold our bodies and step out into the night. We load up our arms and go inside the inn, bags bulging-empty.
Did you know? The Samaritan woman who encountered Jesus at the well outside of that “unclean” town became, in defiance of all appearances, the first recorded missionary in the Bible.
I wander into the hotel lobby looking for the man Kevin spoke to on the phone, wondering if he’s the end-of-day disheveled guy sitting in reception who lifts a hand as we walk by, or the man with the ring of keys clipped to a belt loop who, moments later, hurries up to our room to help, apologetically, when our key cards just won’t open the door.
We have a room, but we can’t get into it.
Our suitcases and backpacks, our bags and pillows, sag against the tired walls, and I sigh, sagging too, noting that the hallway carpet looks as dirty as, honestly, my own unswept floors at home.
“I thought I’d try my master key just to see if I could get you in,” the man’s saying, stretching a key card out on a retractable cord, jamming it into the lock on the door. Red lights flash. “But no, looks like all we’re getting is no’s from everywhere, so we’ll need to reprogram the door, unfortunately.”
All no’s from everywhere call for one thing, reprograming, the way all the longing in the world calls for real refreshing and every worn-out soul calls for re-creation. This whole weary world groans for reformation.
I’m looking, thinking this must be him, this must be the guy, and at the same time, I’m still turning somewhere deep inside to look at Jesus, meeting that Samaritan woman on common thirsty ground, depleted from travel.
“I’m sorry,” our helper continues, like his contrition could well be a run-on sentence hoping to avoid a run-in with us. “This happens from time to time, never know quite when or where it’ll be, just a fluke thing, you know, it’ll take a few minutes, unfortunately, I’m sorry, but we’ll get you in there shortly, I promise.”
I cannot imagine what we look like to him, looking back through stinging eyes at nearly midnight, sagging against the wall in what appears to be the only part of this hotel that isn’t currently under renovation, but I wonder can he see, through the travel grime, that I am captivated, most of all, by Christ.
I know the gift, anyway, now that I’m finally seeing, and I’m turning inwardly to ask, Could you just somehow pour some living water out tonight through me?
Our hotel helper disappears for a few minutes, returning with a small machine that whirs inside the lock.
Reprogramming. Renewing. Redirecting. Renovating. Resurrecting.
Everything everywhere the world over starts from grubby unclean and weary worn and locked up dead-tight and moves, by way of grace, toward fresh new and open-free, toward life.
The lights on the lock flash green, and the man, the one with all the keys and the uncommon hospitality, turns and smiles.
“Okay, there we go,” he says, pushing the door of the room open. “Again, I’m really, really sorry.”
“It’s really, really okay,” I say, lifting my eyes from the floor to return what I hope he reads as a genuine smile, one travel-weary soul to another. “You’ve been so helpful. Thank you…for taking care of us.”
