The Daughter at the Well

Coming to Christ was, in many ways, the easy part.

The struggle came afterwards.

Because the more I came to know Jesus, the more I realised just how intrinsically connected He is to the land of Israel and to the Jewish world in which He lived.

Jesus was Jewish.
Mary was Jewish.
His disciples were Jewish.
The Scriptures He knew were Jewish.
Jerusalem was part of His story, not simply the setting for it.

And the more I try to live as closely as I can to the way Jesus lived, the more I find myself having to acknowledge the Jewish rhythms, traditions and festivals that were simply part of His life.

Shabbat.
Rosh Hashanah.
Sukkot.
Passover.
Shavuot.
The Temple.
The festivals.
The Scriptures.

I don’t do this because I am claiming to be Jewish. I’m not.

I do it because I am trying to walk in the footsteps of Christ.

If I want to understand the man I follow, I have to understand the world He actually lived in — rather than only the version of Christianity that developed centuries afterwards.

And perhaps that is where some of my struggle has come from.

Because I have come to Christ at a time when the land so deeply connected to His life is at the centre of a reality I find profoundly painful.

The genocide in Gaza. The actions of the IDF. The policies of the Israeli government. The suffering of Palestinians. The occupation and the destruction I see unfolding.

I cannot simply put those things to one side because I love Jesus.

And equally, I don’t want my horror at what is happening today to erase the Jewishness of Jesus or make me turn away from the places that were so deeply woven into His life.

I am learning that I can hold these things together.

I can love Christ without supporting the Israeli government.

I can care deeply about Palestinian lives without denying the Jewish connection to the land.

I can oppose injustice without directing that opposition towards Jewish people.

And I can recognise that the modern State of Israel, its government and its military are not the same thing as the Jesus I have come to love, nor are they the same thing as the many Jewish people I know.

But the places themselves still call to me.

I long to see Nazareth, where He grew up.

I long to walk through Galilee.

I long to see the gardens and olive trees.

I long to stand in Jerusalem and look upon the city through the eyes of the Jewish man who walked its streets, taught in its Temple and wept over it.

I want to encounter the landscape of His life — not through the lens of modern politics, but through the eyes of Christ.

Because if I am going to walk in the footsteps of Christ, I have to walk in His footsteps — not in all the footsteps that men have made since.

That doesn’t mean rejecting everything that came after Him.

It means constantly asking myself: What did Jesus actually do? How did He live? What mattered to Him? What did His world look like?

And perhaps that is the tension I never expected when I came to Him.

I didn’t really find Christ.

Christ found me.

And understanding how to hold my love for Him, the Jewishness of His life, the festivals and rhythms that shaped His world, and the places where He walked alongside the suffering happening in that same part of the world today has been much harder.

I don’t have it neatly reconciled.

Maybe I don’t need to.

I just know that I love Jesus.

And I still long to walk where He walked.

His Word for Today

Deuteronomy 29:5 — Sustained in the Wilderness

God doesn’t always take us out of the wilderness, but He promises to sustain us through it.

Even when the journey feels long and the way ahead is uncertain, His faithfulness provides what we need for each step.

The God who sustained Israel through forty years in the wilderness is still faithful to sustain us today.

Today, I trust Him with what I need for today.

One of the things I am beginning to understand more deeply about Christianity is the profound distinction it makes between the Creator and creation. God is the Creator; we are His creation. The world, nature, the universe and everything within it are creation, not God. Yet everything that exists is dependent upon Him and ultimately points back to Him.

I think there is something incredibly humbling about recognising that we can know God without ever being able to fully comprehend Him. We can seek Him, love Him, worship Him and experience His presence, but we cannot contain Him within our understanding. God is not simply an idea or a feeling that we can define according to our own experience. There is a difference between knowing God and knowing everything about God.

Christianity leaves room for that mystery. We can genuinely know God while accepting that our knowledge is incomplete. We can have faith without having every answer. We can ask questions without losing faith. We can stand in awe of something that is greater than our ability to explain.

And I think the distinction between Creator and creation is important because it stops us from making ourselves, nature or the universe into something they are not. A sunrise isn’t God, the sea isn’t God, the stars aren’t God, and we aren’t God. But creation can still reveal something of its Creator. It can point beyond itself towards the One from whom everything comes.

Then Christianity states that the Creator entered His creation. In Jesus Christ, Christians believe that God came into the world He made, taking on human nature and coming near to humanity. The Creator did not remain distant from His creation; He entered into it.

For me, that makes Christianity fundamentally relational.
It isn’t about discovering that I am divine or trying to escape my humanity. It is about coming to know the God who created me and learning to live in relationship with Him.

There is actually something deeply freeing in recognising that I am not God. I don’t have to understand everything, control everything or carry the weight of everything. I am allowed to be human: finite, limited, learning and still searching. My limitations don’t make me worthless. They simply remind me that I am creation, not the Creator.

Perhaps faith isn’t about possessing complete certainty. Perhaps it is about being willing to keep seeking, keep learning and keep asking, while remaining humble enough to recognise that God will always be greater than my understanding of Him.

I don’t need to become God. I don’t need to contain God within my own ideas. I simply want to know God.

And perhaps there is a quiet peace in that distinction: God is God, and I don’t have to be.

One of the names of God I’ve been discovering is El Roi, a Hebrew name meaning “The God Who Sees Me.”

It comes from Genesis 16:13, when Hagar encounters God in the wilderness. Hagar is alone, distressed and vulnerable, and after her encounter with God she gives Him this name: El Roi — the God who sees me.

The name itself comes from Hebrew. “El” (אֵל) means God, while “Roi” (רֳאִי) is connected with the Hebrew idea of seeing, looking upon or perceiving. So the name carries the beautiful sense of God who sees me — not merely seeing me physically, but seeing and knowing me completely.

There’s something incredibly powerful about that.

God sees what I’m going through. He sees the things I don’t say out loud. He sees my struggles, my fears, my hopes and the parts of me that other people might never see. He sees me when I feel invisible, and He hasn’t forgotten me.

And I think that’s what makes this name so personal. It reminds me that I don’t have to explain everything to God for Him to understand me. He already sees me.

You can pray the name El Roi whenever you need to remind yourself of that.

You might simply say:

“El Roi, You are the God who sees me. You know me completely. You see where I am, what I’m carrying and what I need. Help me to remember that I am never unseen or forgotten. Amen.”

You don’t need a special time or place to pray it. You could pray it in the morning, before going to sleep, while walking, when you’re overwhelmed, or simply whenever you need to feel close to God.

For me, there’s something deeply comforting about knowing that the God who sees everything also sees me personally.