“The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you people say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem’” (John 4:19-21).

I should have picked an easier book. But it was the cheapest one I could find. It was a Michael Crighton novel translated into Spanish, set in Jamaica in the 1600′s. I soon figured out that there was a lot of vocabulary that I would never use.
As I waded through words like prow, poop-deck, different words for sails, cannons, and other strange equipment used by 17th century sailors and pirates, I came across a strange word: clepsidra. I looked it up in the Spanish-English dictionary, which didn’t help, because the word in English is clepsydra! Wikipedia.org explained that the word meant “water clock”, an ancient way of telling the time.

Now if I find a Spanish speaker who wants to talk about piracy in the 1600′s and how they kept time, I’m set! But can I talk about the normal day-to-day things that normal people talk about?

The Samaritan woman was talking to “a prophet.” He wanted to talk about her life and how to save it. So she needed to divert him. “Let’s not talk about my life of desperation and sin. Let’s talk about where ‘you people’ say we should worship.”

It reminds me of the times I have tried to study with someone. The first thing they want to study is the book of Revelation, or Daniel, or Ezekiel! They don’t want to know how to save their soul, how to walk with God, how important Christianity is to their life here and here after. They want to jump into the big words like Armageddon before they have learned the words for salvation.
It is easier to discuss the philosophy of theology than to look at a life of sin and face the fact that things have to change. Like the woman at the well, it’s easier to talk about the big, hard-to-understand concepts that don’t require us to look at our own sinful lives. “Let’s talk about how Revelation predicts the future, not about the living water that saves me NOW.”

I will probably never again use the word clepsidra. But I will use the words repentance, baptism, salvation and eternal life over and over again. I will quote Acts 2:38 more often than any verse in the book of Revelation when I am studying with someone who hasn’t even become a Christian yet!

Our task is to not be distracted by avoidance techniques, but to bring people back to the words that have eternal life.

Barbara A Oliver @ www.forthright.net