John 4:25

This verse comes from a conversation at a well between Jesus and a Samaritan woman in John chapter 4. The Samaritans were a people with mixed Jewish and Gentile heritage who had developed their own version of Jewish scripture and religious practice. Like the Jewish people, they had their own form of messianic hope — they were waiting for a figure called the Taheb, meaning 'restorer,' based on a passage in the book of Deuteronomy, who would come to clarify all religious questions and set things right. In this verse, the woman is in the middle of a theologically charged exchange with Jesus — she doesn't yet know who he is — and she expresses a longing that many people throughout history have shared: someday, someone will come and make everything clear. She is seconds away from learning that the one she is waiting for is the one she is already talking to.

Lord, thank you for meeting people in their waiting and their wondering — in the middle of their questions, not just at the end of them. I have things I haven't understood and doubts I haven't fully voiced. Meet me there, the way you met her at the well. I don't need every answer. I just need you. Amen.

There is something quietly heartbreaking about the phrase 'when he comes.' She has been carrying questions — about God, about why her people and the Jewish people worship differently, possibly about her own tangled life — and her hope is still on the horizon. Someday. Not yet. When he comes, everything will be explained. She doesn't know she has already found her way into the most clarifying conversation of her life. The answers she's been deferring are sitting four feet away, dusty from the road, asking her for a drink of water. Most of us have a 'when he comes' list — questions we've shelved for later, doubts we've decided to revisit when we feel more spiritual, wounds we haven't brought to God because we're not sure he has an answer. This woman shows us something valuable: she carried her questions honestly and said them out loud. She didn't fake certainty she didn't have. And her story invites you to notice that the one who can meet your deepest questions may already be present in a conversation you almost didn't have, in an ordinary moment you weren't expecting to be significant at all.