Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, May 3, 2025
Earlier this week, just around the corner from our cul-de-sac, I noticed this fire hydrant. As you can see, over the years it has been adorned with various coats of paint. I’m assuming that the brown is the original color—maybe rusted metal. Then, if I’m analyzing correctly, came a layer of blue, and finally of white. But the white is rusted and cracked as well.
Aesthetically, this fireplug is not a thing of beauty. The most charitable thing you can say about it is that it has “personality.” But the most important question is, does it do what it’s supposed to do? It doesn’t seem to have been used much — I can’t notice any wrench-abrasions on the large nut at the top, which I assume is what the fire personnel would turn in order to release the water into a hose clamped onto the valve at the left. But I’m pretty certain that if water were needed, water would be quickly available.
When I was growing up, the church I attended was actually a one-room school classroom, with school desks pushed to the walls and cold gray folding chairs arranged for the pews. Later I attended a brand-new college church with an expensive organ and huge, contemporary stained glass windows. Still later, I had the opportunity to co-author a book with a Russian Adventist leader, who described humble house-church services in the Soviet Union, to which members traveled secretly every Sabbath morning, always alert for KGB infiltrators.
But each of these churches, scruffy or fancy, faithfully and abundantly provided the same “water” — the Water of Life. And that water was so precious and so satisfying that externals didn’t seem as important.
Jesus once got into a gentle theological debate with a woman who came to a well to get some water. He asked for a drink, and after a bit of back-and-forth, here’s what happened:
Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? . . . Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” — John 10:10 – 14 [NKJV]:
This life-giving “water,” of course, was salvation. Here are some more details: