SWEET WATER IN THE DESERT

Abba Doulas, the disciple of Abba Bessarion said, ‘One day when we were walking beside the sea I was thirsty and I said to Abba Bessarion, “Father, I am very thirsty." He prayed and said to me, “Drink some of the sea water." The water proved sweet when I drank it, so I poured some into a leather bottle. The old man asked me why I was doing this. I said to him, “For fear of being thirsty later on, Father." Abba replied, “God is here with us now to care for us; He will be with us later.”

God is always present. He cares for us.

I believe the two above sentences are true. You probably do, too. Our daily experience, though, suggests otherwise. Our world spins on, often in foolishness, injustice, and brutality. God seems more absent than present. While there are good things all around us, while we’ve been born into a world still fragrant with the scent of Eden, evil is here, too. Where there is evil, there is fear.

Fear is our response to the reality of evil.

Strut as bravely as we can, fear lies like a coiled serpent in every human breast. We fear different things, but all of us know its icy clutch.

We get used to living with fear. It becomes a part of how we function—or, perhaps how we don’t function. It keeps us from picking up rattlesnakes lest we get bit, but it also keeps us from telling the truth lest we get criticized. In our fallen world, fear has its uses. Bad things happen; it’s wise to be cautious.

When Brother Doulas, the young disciple of Abba Bessarion, filled his canteen, it was a smart thing to do. He knew he’d be thirsty later. Note that Abba Bessarion didn’t tell him to empty it. What he did do, was point his disciple to something more important than sweet water—even in the desert.

“You’ve entrusted yourself to God,” he told Brother Doulas. “So trust Him.”
He didn’t say they’d find more water ahead, or that God would again make bitter seawater sweet. He didn’t say they wouldn’t get thirsty again. Only this: “He is with us now, He will be with us later.”

Abba Doulas tells the story on himself. He learned what the old man carried with him as a daily reality: I get thirsty, I have needs and there is God. Abba Doulas doesn’t tell us—perhaps he didn’t know—what Abba Bessarion’s prayer was. We have a good hint though—and it’s not the wondrously sweetened seawater. He says to Brother Doulas “God is with us now, God is with us later.” That’s a prayer of trust.

Fear lurks in our souls, whispering all the evil possibilities. Faith, our trust in God, insists only this: that God is with us now, and always. We don’t know what’s going to happen. The things we’re afraid of may come—the job is lost, the diagnosis is cancer, he does want a divorce—and as they come, they go, leaving pain in their wake. Trusting God doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen. It means when they do, His Presence takes the fear and the pain and transfigures them: He makes the evil holy, the bad good, the fear faith.

What did Brother Doulas expect to taste as he put his cupped hands full of saltwater to his mouth? If he was like you and me (and I think that’s the point of the story), saltwater. But he drank in faith, and found it miraculously sweet.