“The Well of Providence is deep,” Mary Webb says. “It's the buckets we bring to it that are small."
This quote always brings to mind images of the fabled Fountain of Youth. An ancient stone well, its rocks chipped and weathered by the wind, moss slowly creeping up its sides. We look into the well and see only damp-smelling darkness.
We have come to ‘draw water from the well of salvation’—but find our small bucket has a hole in it. Salvation keeps running out the hole; we keep thirsting in the midst of plenty.
This concept of rejoicing in the midst of adversity seems one such leaky bucket. Nevertheless, our hero of the swamp, “went on his way rejoicing” through four more days of walking through the alligator infested swamp—knee-deep in muddy water, without food or companionship.
Wherefore the rejoicing?
He wasn’t happy to begin with. When in adversity you don’t rejoice. Like our hero, when shooting pain comes out of the blue it is incapacitating. All he could do was sit on that log for a while in the middle of the swamp.
But the adversity caused him to fall to his knees in prayer. And his knee was healed. Problems solved? No—he was still hungry, wet, dirty, companionless, didn’t know where his next meal was coming from, didn’t know when the swampy land would end…
He still had lots to grumble about. But he choice to focus on the one thing he had going for him. He could walk out of the swamp. And so he chose to be grateful for the gift granted him—he chose to rejoice in the journey in the midst of adversity.
Gratitude for present blessings served to plug the hole in the bucket he brought to the well. And so he was able to draw and drink.
“Not what we have but we enjoy constitutes our abundance,” as Epicurus says.
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