The woman was alone.
I've often read the scene in John 4 as a pitiful one. She was alone because she couldn't bear the looks and the whispers from the other women who made their way to the well in the early morning hour. I've seen her as a hard woman; guarded and detached from the day to day.
But who among us ever wants to be alone? Underneath the hard, isn't there soft? Has everything inside really turned as hard as the shell that surrounds it?
He told her to give Him a drink. According to the text, He didn't ask for it; He demanded it. It was another man demanding something from her. She responded with a question and then a statement of the obvious: "You shouldn't even be talking to me!"
The words that follow have everything to do with why they are in this place together: water. But what if the scene looked different? What if this woman was in this place for something altogether different? What if she had come for the very thing she had chased after all of her life yet had come up so empty from? What if, instead of a well, the scene involved an altar? What if the dialogue wasn't centered around water, but around love? I think it would sound like this:
"Give Me something from your heart"
"How is it that You ask me for a piece of my heart?"
"If you knew the gift of God, and Who it is Who speaks to you, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you a new heart"
"Sir, You have nothing to offer me that I have not been offered before. The need I have goes deep. How could You possibly, in this one moment, give me what I've tried my whole life to find? What makes what You have so much greater than what other men have offered me in the past?"
"What the others have offered has left you barren and unloved. And the more you fill yourself with these men, the more unloved you will feel. But, if you will allow Me to give you what you've never had--a new heart made of flesh and not of stone--it will become in you a never-ending place of satisfaction"
"Sir, I think You know me. I think You have looked into what I have worshiped"
"Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when you will long to worship only One. This is the true worship--a worship involving spirit and truth; for this is what My Father has been looking for in you".
"I know that the one we have all been looking for is out there; our true soul mate"
And Jesus said to her, "I am He"
And with these words, the woman left. She walked away from her cold, desperate heart that day, and left with one that had been touched by love. He had told her everything she had done, and He had shown her how empty the "everything" had left her.
There would be no more husbands, and no more "empty" needing to be filled. She had gone to that place looking once again to be satisfied, but never really expecting to find it. She had gone with her empty, knowing that she would return with the same empty the next morning, and that her journey with this empty would probably never end.
But not today. Today, the heart was full. Today, the heart was satisfied. This man was like no other man, and He had given her what she had been seeking all of her life.
You see, He didn't come to her altar to do what all the others had--to touch her unloved heart. He came to change it.
