Broken Wells

This morning, the church I’m involved in held a “training” in which we discussed one of our core values, Reconciling Community.  The basic idea, the core theology that drives our church, is that the world was designed by God to be unified and healthy, but that sin has made it broken and unhealthy.  Since that first happened, God has been working (both independently and through humanity) to restore the world to wholeness.  What we talked about this morning was the ways in which the Church — and our church specifically — is to be a community that participates in this reconciliation of the broken parts of the world, restoring the relationships between self and other, self and God, and even self and self.  (That’s a really summarized version, of course, and I’d be happy to talk at greater length about those ideas if anyone is interested!)

All groups develop a unique kind of language for talking about the things that are important to them, and the Vineyard Movement is no different — we have catch phrases that express ideas that are significant to our theology.  One of those catch phrases is “Broken Wells,” based on Jeremiah 2:13:

My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me,
the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

The idea is that God is what we really need, but instead of living lives of pursuing God we often try to have our needs met by other things — things that ultimately fail.  We forsake the spring of living water in favor of broken wells.

To give a personal example, one of the “broken wells” in my own life has been video games.   At various points in my life, I feel a need for significance, a need to be known and recognized by others.  A lot of times what I’ve done in order to meet that need is create a new character on an MMO, or download a new game and try and reach the top rankings, or play LOTS of Guitar Hero… I end up spending ridiculous amounts of time playing games with no real, lasting meaning, all because I’m trying to feel like my life is in some way important.  I neglect real responsibilities, putting off work and homework and time with my family and friends, because I mistakenly think that the best way for me to feel the respect and significance I’m seeking is to be good at _______.

That’s dumb.

Fortunately, it’s been a little while since I’ve fallen into that routine.  Trying to work three different jobs, along with all of the medical responsibilities I have right now, has helped to protect me from that unhealthy pattern in my life.  But the principle is still present, and discussing it with my church this morning made me really consider this investigation into my values that I’ve begun.

Values alone don’t determine our success or failure.  I don’t think it’s wrong of me to value significance, or even to value the respect of others.  But when my ordering of values gets out of whack, when my priorities get improperly aligned, I may be a “successful” Guitar Hero player and an absolute failure of a husband.  That’s not worth it.

That’s a whole lot of explanation for a very simple idea, I know.  :)     But the notion of broken wells is a large part of how I understand values — not only do I want to recognize what is important to me, but I want to understand how my values relate to each other, and which are of greater or lesser importance.