The central tourist attraction in Greensburg, Kan., is The Big Well. It’s the world’s largest hand-dug well. When the town was founded in the late 1870s, The Big Well was intended to put Greensburg on the map with a promise of water for steam engines and settlers. For a while, it seemed to work. 

The town’s population spiked briefly before Oklahoma Territory was opened to White settlers, at which point even D.R. “Cannonball” Green, the town’s founder, went south. 

In 1900, the water tower and pipe structure were dismantled and sent to Alva, Okla. (“Fortunately, Alva couldn’t take the hole, too,” quips the museum sign.) 

What remained was converted into a roadside attraction. A 2007 tornado leveled the building that covered the Big Well, but it has been reconstructed as a snazzy visitors center and museum documenting the tornado. You can descend the spiral staircase, 109 feet into the cool depths.

Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (John 15:9). To abide is to encounter Jesus, to live from a sense of his presence and love. 

Jesus is calling us to return daily to the well.

Encounter with Jesus lies at the heart of our faith. A central conviction of Anabaptism is that we can and must descend the spiral staircase into the well for ourselves — even if that sometimes means going around and outside a church hierarchy that has become possessive and restrictive of God’s gifts. 

We have to encounter Jesus, and we believe anybody can do it. Maybe Anabaptism is a movement to restore the immediacy and primacy of abiding with Jesus. 

Yet the immediacy and primacy of abiding with the living Lord Jesus can all too easily become overshadowed. 

Sometimes doctrine takes its place. You can know all the theological chutes and sluices yet not meet Jesus. True theology is an invitation to abide more deeply in the knowledge of Jesus. 

Ethics can elbow out encounter with Jesus. You can be a good person — have a Social Security number, pay your taxes, help your landlady carry out her garbage — yet if you haven’t met Jesus, you’re missing reality. 

Walking in Jesus’ ways flows from abiding in him, as John makes clear in his first letter (1 John 2:6).

Even worship can become hollow if we’re not abiding in Jesus.

We have to go back to the well.

How? In the Gospel of John, Jesus teaches two ways we abide in him: in his word and at his table. Jesus says his words should abide in us (15:7). That means to savor and internalize the scriptures, especially the Gospels. 

Jesus also says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (6:56). That is to say: Come frequently to the table of the Lord to receive Jesus in bread and wine. These are Christ’s gifts of encounter: word and table.

But abiding in Jesus isn’t a thing to do or to work at. 

In her book, The Interior Castle, the 16th-century Spanish saint Teresa of Ávila describes encountering God in terms of drawing from two different kinds of water sources. Prayer involves either working or waiting. 

In the first, “water comes from far away through many aqueducts and the use of much ingenuity.” You have to work at it. This aqueduct-type prayer involves doing mental preparation for God’s Spirit to flow in us. It might mean imaginatively meditating on a passage of scripture. 

In contrast, the second kind of encounter comes about through what Teresa calls “the prayer of quiet.” It’s “right there, and the trough fills without any noise.” It’s waiting on God, being with God, opening our heart to whatever God desires to do in us. 

Of this kind of prayer, Teresa writes: “The important thing is not to think much but to love much.” Go to the well and encounter Jesus.

In this way, abiding with Jesus involves not-doing. The well fills in from below, without any noise. If we are quiet, if we are unhurried, Jesus leads us along his simple way. We begin to just be with him. 

With Jesus is always a good place to be. The structures of our lives may get dismantled. F5 storms may strike. But they can’t take that big well.