Down in the Well

Down in the Well

 

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding…”   Proverbs 3:4

 

My neighbor Dudley Mercer tells a story from his Dry Creek childhood.  His family farm had a 35-foot deep well on which they relied for all of their water needs.

Dudley’s family also had a problem: one of their chickens had fallen down in the well.  This spelled eventual doom for the chicken (which they could hear clucking below.)  It also meant disaster for the family.  A dead chicken in the well meant contamination of the family’s only source of water.

So Dudley volunteered to go on the rescue mission.  His father put a board across the water bucket.  Dudley sat on the bucket and his father lowered him by rope down into the well.

The chicken was rescued to cackle for another day.

And the Mercer’s had clean well water.

I asked Dudley about what it was like to be that deep in a well. He smiled as he remembered an event from over seventy years ago. “It was sure dark down there… and you’d better trust who is on the other end of the rope.”

Well said, Dudley.   (Bloggers are allowed one pun per 2500 words.  That’s mine for the month.)

Several lessons from this story:

  1. It perfectly pictures perfect trust. Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
  2. Dudley was in a deep dark place. It’s in those dark places that whom and what we trust are revealed.
  3. Dudley trusted his father to hold the rope. No one else would do.   Trust in the Lord.  Our Heavenly Father has never dropped anyone yet.

 

                                             Lord, teach me to trust you boldly and completely.  Amen.

 

 

 

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