Toilet Water

Clank!

Uh-oh. The tell tale sounds of the one-year-old playing in the bathroom — -AGAIN — — redirect my movements. Briskly, I stride into the room. Sure enough, a cup of toilet water sloshing in one hand and the cup’s matching lid in the other, she smiles jubilantly at me, the front of her shirt damp. Swallowing down a gag reflex, I whisk her away from the crime scene and off to a sink for clean-up.

Nasty!

Just minutes before, I had passed the baby as she walked through the kitchen with that blue sippy cup in one hand and its lid in the other. “Need a drink?” absently I asked, not slowing down a step.

Blast. If I only I had stopped to fill that need, she wouldn’t have gone looking for her own readily available resources.

The experience made me think.

How often in the daily routine do I walk by people with their personal emotional or spiritual empty cup in hand without offering the “living water” of Jesus Christ and His gospel? And how often do those people, needing to fill their souls with something, turn instead to the world’s readily available substitutes — the equivalent of toilet water — that may look harmless now and cause spiritual illness later?

Elder Jose L. Alonso taught that “(Jesus Christ) is the living water, fulfilling the deepest needs of our souls with His constant love and kindness.”

We can be the hands to point our fellow travelers to “the well of water springing up into everlasting life”, perhaps also pausing to refresh and drink freely from those waters ourselves.

No need to sip toilet water.