Drink and I will water your camels, too

By Barbara Steinhauser

When Jack and I were married twenty years ago, I asked Pastor Groehler to preach about Rebekah at the well.  Her statement, “Drink and I will water your camels, too” reflected the kind of love I wanted to exhibit in our marriage: generosity of spirit; servanthood; compassion.  I didn’t realize that camels can drink 21 gallons of water in ten minutes and up to 50 gallons in a couple hours- especially on a Sahara Desert 118 degree summer day.  Camels only drink once every five days so when they drink, they consume bucket after bucket of water.  Obviously somebody strong has to lift the overflowing bucket.  In Genesis 24, Rebekah was that person.  Rebekah who birthed Esau and Jacob: patient, strong and agile Rebekah, the mother of a nation. 

Camels have learned to conserve water and to survive on poor vegetation in order to live in tough places like deserts.  But even they couldn’t survive without help from someone like Rebekah and her buckets of water. There is a mutual dependency, reflected in the vocabulary of western Saharan nomads— a language that contains about 700 different words for describing camels.  Camels need human help and humans in these environments need camels.  Gauthier-Pilters and Dagg talk about the camel nomads of the western Sahara in their book, The Camel: "The hard living conditions...forge a close bond between animals and men, probably closer than that in any other culture."

Poetry therapist Mary Reynolds Thompson says, “Deserts are places of transformation.  Places where we release what no longer brings us alive.  The desert’s emptiness and spaciousness offers no place to hide.  It’s a blank canvas upon which we paint survival, contemplation and completion.”   Marriage has its desert moments.  Months when we sit back on our haunches, contemplating what must be released and remembering what must be maintained.  But what happens when we release something important, out of anger or ignorance?  Like Isaac and Rebekah, we must open to forgiveness, when something released in the desert turns out to be nothing less than living water.

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