Ultimately, the provision of water isn’t about geology, or atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, or even about what humans need to survive. It is about a people who are desperate to know, “Where is God in relation to us?”

If you'd been here, Lord... I think a lot of us know that sentence. We've asked it of ourselves. And we've asked it of God.

If the point of this parable is not about the mechanisms of forgiveness, what if the point is about the conditions of forgiveness? And by that I don’t mean conditional forgiveness. I mean forgiveness as a way of life — as something we cultivate the conditions for, with God’s help.

What does mutual forbearance look like for a person of faith today living in a deeply polarized country; in a culture that would rather cancel than communicate, where relationships seem disposable the moment conflict arises, when it is difficult to see that those who do things we abhor are also made in the image of God?