Change Your Thoughts. Change Your Life. Pt 5
Our Happiness Hinges On the Story We Tell Ourselves (Part 1)
At the close of 1938, Europe was on the brink of war. Hitler's intent to "cleanse Europe" of all Jewish people was cemented, and the infamous Munich pact or Munich agreement essentially gave Hitler carte blanche to march his armies into Czechoslovakia.
Enter Nicholas Winton, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker from London. Shortly before Christmas 1938, Winton planned to travel to Switzerland for a skiing holiday. Following a call for help from Marie Schmolka and Doreen Warriner, he decided instead to visit Prague and help Martin Blake, who was in Prague as an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, then in the process of being occupied by Germany.
His timing was critical. Violence against Jewish people was escalating all over Europe. As Hitler's armies entered Prague, violence, property seizures, and deportation of the Czech Jewish community to concentration camps were almost immediate.
Winton succeeded, thanks to the guarantees he had obtained from Britain. After the first train, the process of crossing the Netherlands went smoothly. Winton ultimately found homes in Britain for 669 children, many of whose parents would perish in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Over just a few months, Winton, a sort of saviour for these children, was able to change the lives and the stories of six hundred and sixty-nine children, many of whose parents, other relatives, and friends would die in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Few people even knew what Winton did for nearly fifty years because he never mentioned it himself. But if it had not been for his intervention, those children's stories would have been radically different. Through his sacrifice, Winton gave those children a new story.
There are several reasons I wanted to share this powerful story with you:
We need to be tethered to history to know how to navigate the present and the future.
We need to be inspired by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
What Winton did points so beautifully to God's greater story in the world and the one He wishes to weave in your and my life.
Here I mean: We need a Saviour to give us a new story. That's what Nic Winton did for those nearly seven hundred children, and that's what Jesus does—to a far greater degree and with eternal consequences—for us.
I know that is a fairly bold statement, especially if you are not yet a follower of the way of Jesus, but I believe to my core that it is true. If we want to be fully happy, we need a new story… we need a Saviour to give us a new story.
Author Derren Brown writes, we are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.
Every one of us has an inherited view, an inherited story, an inherited place, and perspective in life, a sense of who we are or who we think we need to be, and the health of the story we are telling ourselves is the lid on our happiness.
The good news we have is that we do not have to be hostage to whatever story we have inherited. The Scriptures tell us that Jesus desires to give us a new story, a story that promotes rather than demotes our happiness; a story that erases and eliminates whatever story we thought we had to embrace. A story that promises us abundant life now and forever.
Receiving Jesus rewrites our story
… and much like those children saved from certain death by one man who was willing to enter their story and change it… we can be rescued by one man—Jesus—who is delighted to enter our story and help us live out a new one. Still, we have to let go of our inherited narrative.
John's Gospel, in chapter four, provides a peek into the life of someone like us, living out of an inherited narrative until she encountered Jesus, and her life and happiness were forever changed.
What led to this encounter between Jesus and this ancient woman whose story He would change? The religious establishment of the day had been investigating Jesus. Jesus knew this, His ministry was exploding, and the envy of the Pharisees was growing. Rather than indulge in their drama at that moment, Jesus chose instead to leave the Judean countryside altogether and return to Galilee.
Jesus' chosen path to Galilee is significant.
John writes that Jesus had to go through Samaria, though His choice to most in His day would seem unusual.
Though going through Samaria was the most direct route from Judea to Galilee, devout Jews did not travel this route. Jews would instead go a hundred or more Kilometers out of their way to avoid Samaria.
Jews did this to avoid what they believed would be defilement because they considered the Samaritans unclean. The Samaritan people's ethnic heritage was part Israelite, part many other nations. Their generations sprang from Jewish people intermarrying with those nations imported into Israel by the Assyrians around 722 BCE.
Yet, here we have Jesus. Unlike many Jewish people in His time, He lives with a love for those on the margins. Jesus' going through Samaria was both a theological and social declaration about God's heart and intentions.
He had to go because God stands on the side of the oppressed.
He had to go because God desires that none would perish.
When Jesus arrived in Sychar, a town in Samaria, He went to Jacob's well. For reference, this is the well that Jacob, whom God renamed Israel, gave to his favoured son Joseph in the Old Testament.
John tells us that Jesus sat down at the Well because His journey had worn Him out. John's statement about Jesus' condition is not just informational; it is theological. Jesus being tired underscores His full and genuine humanity.
If you are not yet a follower of the way of Jesus, this can seem impossible, but Jesus was both fully God and fully human.
In a mysterious union of realities that I cannot fully explain, Jesus, Who existed before time began, became a human being, born in a manger to an unwed teenage mother, while retaining His nature fully as God.
He was God. He was human. He was tired.
Yet, even while tired, He was fully present. Just as He sat down, a Samaritan woman arrived at the well. He could have ignored her in His tiredness but chose to engage her. He decided to enter her story.
To this woman's great surprise, Jesus requests a drink from her. She does not let her surprise go unexpressed. "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" She inquires.
Her question is not rude; Jews did not share things in common with Samaritans. In many ways, as it was here in the U.S. with pools and water fountains, Jewish people so looked down upon and despised Samaritan people that they would not dare drink from the same well.
Share a water bucket? Not a chance.
Then there is Jesus, breaking religious and cultural mores to obey God's desires and directives.
Jews had no dealings with Samaritans.
Religious leaders had no dealings with ordinary people.
Men had no dealings with women who were not their wives.
But God, Who's Never-Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love is toward all people, compelled Jesus to break human expectations for divine predisposition!
Fully present to the moment, Jesus answers her. If you knew who was in front of you, you would be asking me for a drink. I would give you living water, Jesus replies.
The phrase living water, particularly applied to Jesus, has dual meanings. The term refers to a literal fresh spring, and God was also known as the source of life and the Spring of Living Water throughout the Old Testament.
In her response, we see that our beloved Samaritan sister can only see what Jesus is saying through unredeemed lenses. Her focus is entirely on the seemingly insurmountable natural circumstances before her.
Jesus is a Jew speaking to her, a Samaritan. Jesus is a man, talking to her, a woman. Jesus had no bucket to serve her water, and Jacob's well was the deepest in Palestine—more than 100 feet deep. From where she asks, will you get this living water?
Jesus' reply is epic, a poetic and beautiful declaration of the Gospel.
Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.
He is not speaking of H2O, no.
The water she envisions will only satisfy the temporary thirst that comes naturally to us to prevent dehydration. Everyone who drinks Well water will eventually be thirsty again.
But if you imbibe in Me, Jesus says… meaning take my words and my life as the way and the truth and the life… then you will never be thirsty again. If you believe me, your soul, Jesus says, will be satisfied.
God will make you whole.
You will live forever.
You will be truly satiated.
You will get a new story.
I remember well that thirst, running from sport to people to academics, to anything really, hoping to finally feel worthy in the world. At that juncture in my life, I believe I had believed the words of the gospel, but I had not accepted the application of their power. Trusting Jesus was just an addendum to a life—in my mind—already sorted out.
Though I was empty and full of thirst, I did not turn to Jesus for satisfaction. Then it all fell apart. But a very present person in my life, my older roommate, spoke the truth to me. He was present in my pain. He reminded me of where true life and satisfaction come. I drank deeply of Jesus' living water—His words and way—and have never thirsted again.
But what about you? What story are you living? What story have you inherited? What story are you telling yourself? How can you get a new story or re-believe the one you have already been given? In Part Six, we will answer those questions and more.