The Things We Keep Re-Sealing

Every spring, I go out to the garden with whatever version of repair tools and products I have decided on, and I patch the bird bath.

I had help to build it. It is made of rock, and it is a deliberate copy of the one that stood in the garden of my childhood home. I can still hold the visual memory of that one. The shape of it, and how my dad built it himself. When I created my garden in my newly built house, I wanted that. I also mimicked his design of rockeries. So, I found the stone, got help from a friend, and we re-created it! Lovely.

What I did not fully realize was the fact that this is in Colorado, not South Africa.

Water gets into concrete. In winter, that water freezes. Ice expands. And concrete, however carefully you have poured it and sealed it, cracks. So, every year the hairline fractures appear, and water leaks when we first fill it in the Spring. Every year, we have to repair it…it’s a never-ending cycle.

I have built a beautiful structure, and its only job is to hold water, and it cannot do that. Not on its own. It holds water for exactly as long as we keep going out there to fix it.

I have been thinking about how much of our lives can look like that bird bath.

The verse that names it

There is a line in Jeremiah that resonates -

"My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water." (Jeremiah 2:13)

Two things went wrong, not one.

The first was walking away from the spring. A spring is living water — moving, fresh, endlessly replenishing itself. Nobody makes it. Nobody maintains it. You don’t have to earn it or repair it. You simply come to it and drink.

The second was what they built instead. A cistern was a pit hewn out of rock by hand — punishing work — and then plastered so it would not leak. It did not produce water; it only caught what fell. The water in it went still and stale. And when the plaster cracked, all that labour held nothing at all.

The heartbreaking lesson in this verse is not that God's people were lazy. It is that they worked incredibly hard to end up with less, or even nothing. They chose the version that required everything from them, over the one that was already flowing, already free, and asked nothing but that they come.

That is the part that really strikes me. Not the sinfulness of it. The effort of it.

If you’re like me, you identify with how many projects you have given much effort, with nothing to show for it.

Why we build them anyway

Here is what I have noticed about my own cisterns: I rarely built them out of rebellion. I built them out of longing for a past memory, or a sense of hope for something better.

I built that bird bath because I wanted to hold on to something — a childhood, a feeling of home, and many happy memories I wanted back. That is not a wicked motive. It is a heartfelt one. And it still cracked, because nostalgia does not change what freezing water does to concrete.

Most of the cisterns I see in the lives of those I know are like that. The carefully managed image of a family that is “doing fine.” The career that was supposed to finally settle the question of whether we are enough. The relationship we keep patching because we cannot face what it would mean to stop. The endless self-improvement project. The approval of a parent who may never give it. The busyness that keeps us from having to sit still with God and hear what He actually thinks.

We do not dig these out of defiance. We dig them because we are thirsty, and because building something ourselves feels safer than receiving something we feel we can’t control.

Three honest questions

If you are wondering whether you are standing at a spring or in front of a cistern, these are the questions worth reflecting on...

1. What am I re-sealing? Look at where your energy actually goes — not what you say matters, but what you are constantly repairing. What in your life only holds together because you keep going back out with the putty knife? The maintenance is the clue. Living water does not need you to maintain it.

2. What was it built to hold? Every cistern was built to hold something, and usually something good: security, belonging, identity, peace, being known. Name the thing underneath. You are almost never attached to the structure. You are attached to what you hoped it would give you — and that longing is legitimate, even when the structure is not.

3. What is already flowing? This is the one we are tempted to skip. Before you can let go of a cistern, you have to believe there is a spring. Not in theory. Look for where God has already been providing water in your life without you managing it — the friendship you did not engineer, the provision that arrived without your striving, the peace that showed up in the middle of a week that did not deserve it. Those are not coincidences. They are evidence.

Letting go and letting God

"Let go and let God" gets used as though it were a soft phrase. It is not. Letting go of a cistern means standing beside something you built with your own hands, that you love, that cost you enormously — and admitting it was never going to hold what you needed it to hold.

That brings grief. Give yourself permission to feel it. God does not ask you to pretend the loss is nothing. He asks you to stop drinking from something stagnant when He is offering something alive.

And notice what He does not do in Jeremiah. He does not shame them into performing better. He identifies Himself first: I am the spring of living water. The invitation comes instead of accusation. It always does.

We will probably keep patching that bird bath. It is small, and it is sentimental, and there is no great harm in it. But it has become an honest teacher, that causes me to return to the question:

What else am I trying to keep watertight that was only ever meant to be released?

For your reflection this week

• What am I constantly repairing that has never held together?

• What was I really hoping that thing would give me?

• Where has God been providing water I did not have to manufacture?

• What is one cistern I could stop resealing this week?