The Spring on I-90

As a kid, growing up in Northern Idaho, I remember one place along the road where our family would always stop near the summit of Lookout Pass. It was a spring of water. Someone had installed a pipe beside the road, to make it easy to drink the cold, clear water that streamed out of the mountain. On summer days, en route to Montana or back home to Idaho, we would stop and be refreshed by that spring.

Springs are one of the many pictures of spiritual reality that God has sprinkled throughout nature.

The Old Testament relates a story of Moses striking a rock at God’s command. Water came out of the rock and the entire community drank. Referring to this in the New Testament, Paul says, “They all … drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.”1 During his lifetime Jesus said with a loud voice, “‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, … streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this He meant the Spirit…”2

So we have a spring. Clear water. People parched and in need of refreshment. Christ. The Spirit. Drinking. Refreshment. Life for our entire being.

The fourth century mystic Ephrem the Syrian saw this analogy. He wrote, “A thirsty person is happy when drinking, and not depressed, because the spring is inexhaustible. You can satisfy your thirst without exhausting the spring; then when you thirst again, you can drink from it once more.”3

A simple spring of water beside Interstate 90. Water from the mountain. Year after year. Each time someone passes that place, he may pause to drink. The water is sweet and cold.

Jesus is saying to us with a loud voice, “come to me and drink.”

Are you thirsty?






Drawing of Lookout Pass by Byron Dudley4

1 Corinthians 10:4
2 John 7:37-39
3 Shane Claiborne, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010) 64
4 http://byrondudley.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html