The Problem Was Never the Water
The word for Monday, August 10, 2026 is The Problem Was Never the Water.
The anchor verses are John 5:7 and 1 Corinthians 13:12.
In 2017, a woman named Susan Baur got tired of finding beer cans in the ponds she liked to swim in. One afternoon she grabbed two swimmers and a kayaker and told them to come on, they were going to clean up the pond.
Nine years later there are about thirty of them on Cape Cod. They clear roughly twenty ponds a season. The youngest member is sixty five and the oldest is eighty six. They named themselves the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage, and the name was their own idea.
The part that stays with me is how carefully they do it.
Every pond gets scouted before anybody swims in it. The water gets tested for blue-green algae first, because some of it can make you sick. A dive leader works out the routes ahead of time. Swimmers get assigned to kayaks, two or three to a boat. And somebody stands on the shore the whole time with a clipboard, a checklist, and a map, counting heads.
Then they go under and bring up whatever is down there.
Beer cans. Broken glass. Fishing lures. Tires. Car batteries. Whole wooden docks that sank years ago. Once an eighty pound toilet. Once the back end of a Corvette. Somewhere around six thousand pounds of it since that first afternoon.
One of them, Maggie Megaw, said something about why she does it. The water problems where she lives are serious and the solutions have a far horizon. This is tangible. They show up at a pond, they swim, and they bring back a pile.
And not one of those women goes into that water by herself.
Every swimmer has a boat. Every dive has a person on the beach who knows how many went in. They cannot see the bottom before they go down, so they check what can be checked, and then they go down together.
Now open the fifth chapter of John, where there is a pool in Jerusalem with five covered porches, and people lying under them out of the sun.
One man had been there thirty eight years.
Jesus comes and stands over him and asks whether he wants to be made well.
The man does not say yes. He answers with a logistics problem, and it is one of the plainest sentences anybody says to Christ in the whole book.
Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me.
He names what he is missing.
Not health. Not faith. Not the right words to say. A person. One person, to pick him up and move him the last few feet.
Thirty eight years of lying near the thing he believed would fix him, watching somebody else get there ahead of him every single time, because there was nobody to carry him.
And Jesus never puts him in the pool.
HE does not carry him down the steps. HE does not wait for the water to move. HE never mentions the water at all. HE says to get up, pick up his bed, and walk, and the man does.
The man had spent almost four decades believing the answer was in that pool. The answer walked over and stood next to him.
Paul says something in his letter to Corinth that belongs here.
For now we see through a glass, darkly.
He is describing the present condition of being a person. Partial sight. Not a failure to be corrected with more effort or better discipline. The way it is, for everybody, right now.
Those women on the Cape have no idea what is on the bottom of a pond before they go in. That is exactly why there is a checklist and a kayak and somebody on the beach. Partial sight is the reason you take another human being with you.
You may be waiting to say something until you have it more together. Until you understand it. Until you can describe it in a way that does not require anybody to do anything or feel awkward or rearrange a Tuesday.
That man had no such plan. He said he had nobody, and he said it out loud, to a stranger, on a first meeting.
GOD did not scold him for the answer. GOD did not tell him to want it more.
I am not going to promise you that the person you ask will come. I have watched people ask and be left standing there.
What I can tell you is that the admission in that story is a small and ordinary one, and it is not beneath you, and it is the truest thing the man said all day.
The pond gets tested. The kayak gets assigned. Somebody counts heads on the beach.
And then thirty women who cannot see the bottom go down anyway, because none of them is down there alone.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has been at the edge of the same thing for years and has told nobody.
- 🙏 To the one who keeps watching other people get there first.
- 🙏 To the one with help sitting right there who cannot make the ask.
- 🙏 To the one who is somebody's kayak this week and has no idea.
Grace and Peace.