Are You There, God? It's Me, [Your Name Here]

March 8, 2026

Third Sunday of Lent, Year A

Exodus 17:3-7 | Psalm 95 | Romans 5:1-2, 5-8 | John 4:5-42

One of my favorite books from my early teenage years was Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Maybe, like me, you caught the movie a couple years back and felt a strange wave of nostalgia for a book you read as a 12-year-old. Judy Blume wrote it back in 1970, and generations of kids have grown up with it since. The premise is simple: Margaret is a preteen navigating the most awkward stretch of human existence: middle school. She’s doing this without a clear religious identity, caught between her Jewish father's family and her Christian grandparents. So, she does what a lot of us did at some point, even if we'd never admit it: she just talks to God, directly and honestly. Sometimes about silly things, sometimes about big things, but always in her own words with no filters and no pretense.

What struck me most about it, and what strikes me again looking at today's readings, is how normal that kind of prayer is, and how human. One needs only read the Book of Psalms, with David’s raw joy and sorrow, to see how much God seems to actually want our prayers that way.

Let's dive in with the Israelites in Exodus today, because honestly, they're a lot like us. They have just escaped actual slavery. After generations of oppression, God parts the sea, destroys Pharaoh's army, and leads them out of Egypt in one of the most dramatic rescue operations in human history. Despite all this, just a few weeks into the desert, they are tired, hungry, and thirsty. They are done. In their best what-have-you-done-for-me-lately tone, they cry, "Why did you bring us out of Egypt; to have us die of thirst?"

I want to be understanding here. Thirst is real, and wandering in a desert is legitimately miserable. But let’s look underneath the surface: yes, they are physically parched — tongues cracked, throats dry, children crying. Their suffering is genuine, but there is a deeper thirst at work here, one they cannot name and honestly don't even recognize: a thirst for understanding, for a physical and spiritual home, for a relationship with the God who just rescued them. However, instead of turning toward God, they turn against Moses. The Psalm today puts a name on what happened to their hearts in that moment: they hardened. The people of God, dying of thirst both physical and spiritual, just couldn't see that the same God who parted the sea was still right there with them in the desert.

We all do this even today, though not perhaps as dramatically. With us, it's just the slow accumulation of things — busyness, health challenges, family stress, a career that isn't working anymore — and one day, we realize we've stopped bringing any of it to God. It's not because we stopped believing, exactly, but our hearts are nevertheless hardened, and we can’t tell what we’re thirsting for anymore.

Now, let’s pivot to the Gospel and one of my all-time favorite stories: Jesus is traveling through Samaria, which is already a statement, because Jews and Samaritans despised one another. He sits down at Jacob's well, tired from the journey, and a woman comes to draw water, alone. It is noon, the hottest part of the day, when no one else would be there. That detail matters. She wasn't coming at the cool of the morning with the other women of the village. She was avoiding them. She had made choices in her life: five husbands and now living with a man who wasn't her husband. Those choices had separated her not just from her community, but from God. She was as spiritually parched as the Israelites in the desert. Just like them, she came to this well focused entirely on her physical thirst. She had a jar; she needed water. That was the only transaction she was expecting.

Jesus asks her for a drink, and she is startled. "You're a Jew. I'm a Samaritan woman. How are you asking me for a drink?" Then he turns the entire conversation: "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."

She's still thinking practically. The well is deep. He has nothing to draw with; but Jesus isn't talking about hydration. He's talking about deeper, spiritual thirst. "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

St. Augustine, writing centuries later in his Confessions, described this exact ache from his own experience: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You." Augustine spent years chasing everything except God — philosophy, pleasure, status, and ambition — before finally understanding what he was actually thirsty for all along. The woman at this well was doing the exact same thing. Five marriages; a life lived searching; never quite knowing what she was looking for.

Jesus sees and knows all of it. He tells her about her five husbands without being asked. He sees and knows her completely — her whole story, including the parts she's most ashamed of — and he keeps talking to her anyway. In fact, he came to the well to meet her where she was, both literally and figuratively. Being truly known and not rejected? That is living water, and that is our God.

Here is what I want you to walk away with today: God does not wait for us to find him. He comes looking for us. He followed the Israelites into the desert and struck water from a rock, proving his loving care for them yet again. He walked into Samaria on purpose and sat down at a well in the middle of the day to meet a woman who had spent years avoiding exactly this kind of encounter. The physical thirst in both stories is real, but it's a doorway to something deeper. God uses the ordinary, human experience of physical thirst to point toward the deeper spiritual thirst that we often can't articulate — the one Augustine finally named after years of searching, the one Margaret was circling around in her honest, unpolished conversations with God. The Israelites hardened their hearts and almost missed it. The woman at the well almost walked away with just a jar of water.

We don’t feel it most often because we are too hurried and harried in 21^st-century life.

Lent is a great time to sit with all of this and ask ourselves, What am I actually thirsty for, and is what I'm reaching for going to satisfy it? God doesn’t need us to be perfect. He needs us to be willing to sit with him. He’s waiting for us, at the well, with water that can quench any and every thirst we have. He just needs us to show up, quietly and honestly with our needs no matter how profound or silly, just like Margaret did.

Are you there, God? Yep, He's already there. He got there first.