Reflections

The Spring that Crossed the Road

By Wightman Weese, reprinted from The Christian Reader

English: spring water (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My grandfather, James Baldwin, lived in north Georgia near the Tennessee border. Relatives called him “Uncle Baldy.”
His family got their water from a spring near the front of his house. Water in those days was always considered a gift from above.
Often the people who built the spring would drive a nail in a nearby tree and hang a long-handled dipper on it. Anyone who came along could quench his thirst.
But if too many dipped into the water, or if they weren’t careful and knocked dirt in it, Uncle Baldy would get angry and yell at them for “riling up” his spring.
Across the dirt road from Uncle Baldy’s house was a little church. The church had no well or spring of its own. Churchgoers would have to either bring their drinking water from home or risk Uncle Baldy’s wrath by using his spring. Invariably by Sunday afternoon Uncle Baldy’s crystal clear spring water looked more like a mud puddle.
Uncle Baldy had all he could take. One Sunday when the church crowd arrived, they found a fence around the spring. They were no longer permitted to set foot on his property.
I don’t know what the church people did for a while, but soon something strange happened. Uncle Baldy noticed the water level in his spring began to get lower and lower. Then one day the white sand in the bottom of the wooden frame was bone dry.
Several weeks later one of the church members, while eating his Sunday picnic lunch, happened to step backward into a clump of weeds and got stuck in deep mud. Realizing what he had found, he and some of the men in the church brought shovels and dug around the mudhole. Soon a thin stream of water began to trickle out.
The men cut boards, fit the wooden frame into the hole, filled it with sand to filter the water, and sparkling water came bubbling up through it. Now the church had its own water supply.
Across the road, Uncle Baldy’s spring was a dry wooden box stuck in the ground.
“Just a coincidence,” many people said about Uncle Baldy’s spring–which evidently decided to cross the road to join the church!
It was probably hard for Uncle Baldy. But if we get selfish with something God gives, who knows, He may just take it away until we learn the truth that we gain by giving and live by loving.

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Will selfishness get you anywhere?
The rich man in the Bible had such a big harvest and so many riches, but instead of deciding to share with others, he decided to build bigger barns to hold more for himself. (See Luke 12.) It wasn’t the big crop which God gave him that was his sin. His biggest problem was his selfishness, the “barniness” of his own soul. He soon died, and all the things that he didn’t want to share with others, he couldn’t take with him; so he lost it all! That’s selfishness and its reward.
But if you are willing to give, God will reward and repay and bless you so much more that you won’t even be able to hold it all! He’s promised that!
–David Brandt Berg

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Jesus said, “Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you” (Luke 6:38 NKJ).

 
 
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