Bucket Story

Bucket List vs Bucket

The commencement has, well, commenced. (Not sure it was a great literary plan to begin this first post retirement blog with a redundancy of that magnitude.)  My plan in retirement is to travel until the money or the health runs out, which ever comes first.  My lovely bride, Penny, and I have a number of trips on the books.   I will be getting to those in future blogs. My first excursion is with my friend, Elvin.  A tour of the Holy Lands has been on my bucket list for years. 

Elvin and I are going (you will excuse, I pray, the tense confusion as I am writing this on my way back from our trip) on a Bible Land tour to Jordan and Israel.   We signed up for this trip with Dr. Jim Anderson back in February.  Dr. A is a retired seminar professor.  This tour of Jordan and Israel Biblical sites is his 101^st tour he has guided.  He knows everyone in Jordan and Israel.  I kid you not.  Whenever we stopped at an ancient archeological site we were greeted by venders selling everything from water to Sheppard flutes.  About half the time they would run up and greet and often give Dr. A a double cheek kiss.  He would ask about their father and tell us that he had known this you man since he was a young kid.

With the uptick in the conflicts in Israel over the last few days before we began our trip on May 21 I have to admit that I was a bit nervous, maybe a bit more than a bit nervous, perhaps even scared.  I contacted Dr. A and he asked him about the safety issue.  His response was that there is always something going on in Israel between the Palestinians and Israelis.  It has been going on since the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948.  The tour company is in continual contact with the government and we would not go to or go around any local conflicts.  We were in the west bank, a Palestinian occupied territory but we did not go near Gaza on the East side of country.  The way I came to think about it was that people might feel fine visiting Kansas City even in the midst of riots taking place in Saint Louis.  So, we went and had a wonderful time and did not see or hear any violence of any kind.

A trip to the Holy Lands was on my bucket list but I have a story about another kind of bucket.  This one is an actual bucket.  It seems that several friends from our small group at my church went on this same tour with Dr. A back in October of 2017.  One of these was Charles Small.  One of the stops on the tour is Jacob’s well.  Jacob’s well was dug by Jacob and is located in Samaria.  It is where Jesus met the woman at the well that had been married five times.

John 4 New International Version (NIV)

4 Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— ² although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. ³ So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

⁴ Now he had to go through Samaria. ⁵ So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

⁷ When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” ⁸ (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.^[a])

¹⁰ Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

¹¹ “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

¹³ Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

¹⁶ He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

¹⁷ “I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. ¹⁸ The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

¹⁹ “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

²¹ “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²² You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. ²⁴ God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

²⁵ The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

²⁶ Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

When Charles was at Jacob’s well he noticed and was bothered by the fact that this ancient well was using a very modern metal bucket to draw water from the well.  Charles is not the kind of man to let an anachronism of this magnitude go un-remedied.  So, the plan was hatched.  He would have Doug Bratcher a mutual friend that just happens to be an excellent cooper (a maker of barrels and buckets) create a wooden bucket to be used at the well.  He asked Elvin and I back in February when we committed to go on this trip if we would be willing to take the bucket in our luggage to Jacob’s well.  We said we would without giving it much thought.

Well between February and May 20 I did not hear any more about this bucket and had frankly forgotten it.  Then on the day before we were to board the airplane Jan Bratcher the wife of Doug the cooper shows up at my retirement soiree with a wooden bucket and gave it to Elvin (also at the party) and me and asked if we were going to take it.  Elvin chimed in immediately with “NO”.  I whined a bit and asked for details about whether anyone had thought to ask Dr. A if he thought this was a good idea.  No one had.  So, I proceeded to contact Dr. A and told him the sordid tale.  He first said that in fact although the metal bucket certainly would not have been used in either Jacob’s nor Jesus’ time that neither, in all likelihood, would a wooden bucket have been employed in drawing water from the well.  They probably used a clay vessel to lower into the well.  But he said the curators in the Church where the well is located would perhaps maybe accept the bucket.  If they did not, he continued, I could probably use the bucket to collect money on a street corner is Israel by holding a cardboard sign that said “Homeless, please help!”  He took great pleasure in repeating this plan several times to everyone we met on the trip. He further more made every bucket pun and joke you can imagine. He would sing “Fill my cup Lord” and substitute bucket for cup.  It was great fun.

So, I wound up packing the bucket in a second duffle bag and taking it to Israel.  You will have to wait for the day by day accounts of my trip to hear the end of the story.  Suffice it to say that the Bucket story is better than the bucket list.