The story is told of an English farmer who went to visit a sheep farm in Australia. The farm was immense, stretching in all directions as far as the stretch of the sky.
“You must need an awful lot of barbed-wire,” the English farmer observed.
“Not at all, we don’t use any, we just dig wells, and there the sheep stay.”
We humans also gather around wells. In fact many early Christian settlements were founded near sources of water. They provided all that was needed for drinking and washing and baptisms too. One of the ironies of history is that the building of St. David’ s Cathedral completely destroyed the reason for David settling there in the first place: for in order to construct the foundations of this massive statement of ecclesiastical power, the wells and water-courses had to be drained and diverted.
Where are today’s spiritual wells, where do the thirsty come for drink and the heavy laden find rest?
The wells are still here, but are all too often enclosed, hidden by walls and fences of ambition and fear. They are walls that imprison, and fences that say, ‘this is mine’.
It is time to brake down those walls and cut through those fences.
For many are thirsty, and others still are in need of rest.
