The Source

By William Kim Rawlinson

Finding cool water on a hot day taught me how to seek the Savior’s refreshment for the thirsty soul.

I grew up on a small farm in southwest Utah. To escape the heat, our family would sometimes drive up a nearby canyon where a creek flowed year round. I can still feel the dry desert air blowing in my face in the backseat of the car. As we entered the canyon, the air became cooler and more fragrant.

My favorite place to go was the Big Spring, the major source of the creek. At the base of an almost vertical canyon wall, a steady stream of clear, cool, sweet water burst from a cleft in a large boulder.

I learned how to get a drink by watching my father kneel on a large, flat rock and scoop water from the spring. He would never drink downstream, where the water had been fouled by surface runoff. Near the source, the water would always be pure and clear.

Sometimes when I’m thinking of Christ, I think of that spring. The Lord declared to Jeremiah that He is “the fountain of living waters” (Jer. 2:13). Through His Atonement and Resurrection, Jesus Christ is the source of eternal life. Anyone who has come to Christ thirsting for divine truth knows the refreshment that comes as His Spirit fills the mind and heart. When we immerse ourselves in the scriptures, the testimony and doctrines of Christ flow into us like living water, refreshing our souls and renewing our strength.

This refreshment is lasting. To the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, the Savior promised: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:13–14).

As a young boy I learned the difference between the common, muddy water that flowed past my home and the pure, clear water from the stream in the canyon. To obtain the pure water, I had to climb to higher ground. I had to walk the narrow path, and I had to kneel. The pure, clear, sweet water came only at the source of the spring, and it was constant.

We can drink of the living water only as we come out of the world, as we walk the strait and narrow path, as we kneel in prayer, and as we immerse ourselves in the scriptures that witness of the living Savior. As we do so, the Lord will fulfill His promise that within us will be “a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Christ and the Samaritan Woman, by Carl Heinrich Bloch