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Digging Your Own Well
Krisna, one of my closest friends in all the world, lives in Chiangmai Thailand. Her guest house sits next door to her internet cafe; a charming compound of traditional Thai rooms and a restaurant that serves the best chicken and cashew stir fry anywhere in the world. She is an investor, a wife, businesswoman, an elder in the church, a mother of two incredible daughters, a leader in her city.


When you see Krisna in her beautiful home, hosting an elegant Thai dinner…or in her guest house directing her staff…or using her accounting skills to make final financial decisions…or meeting with church leaders, you would never know that she is also a woman who has overcome heartache, survived near financial ruin and experienced the deaths of close loved ones. She just doesn’t talk about it much.

For years, she and I met every Wednesday morning, right after we got the children off to school. Over coffee and fresh baked coffee bread (hers, not mine!) We sat down and discussed our week, studied the Bible, and prayed out our angst of daily life. I was the missionary mentor, but who was I kidding? I learned as much from Krisna as she learned from me.
 
When she lost her only son, we met at our coffee table...
trying to untangle the threads of emotion, faith, and doubt. When people left our church, when money was scarce, when the needs of family overwhelmed me, I knew Wednesday morning would make its way around to me again.

We searched the scriptures, read books and talked out our own therapy. Funny thing…we seldom found all our answers at church. Sometimes. But life doesn’t seem to always happen in sync with the current sermon series. No one has breezed through life on a few hours of church every week.

What we learned, Krisna and I, is that to make it through this marathon, you have to know how to dig your own well. Looking for someone else to always give you what you need, when you need it is a frustrating trek through futility. Perhaps that’s why we get angry and bitter when the people who hold the titles don’t measure up to our expectations.

Maybe they’re not supposed to. Maybe we should be digging down deep until we hit our own water supply. When we do, we no longer fear the desert where the ground cracks and the trees brown out their dying, where no one has our answer, nor the water we need to survive the wasteland.

If you have been diligently digging, you know you’re o.k. And if you burrow down deep enough and get rid of your garbage, other people can come by, dip their cup in, and find enough nourishment to keep walking to their own water.