Turn on the tap
And wash your face
Remember your baptism
Jesus grace
Fill your glass
Bow and pray
Give thanks
For blessings every day
No tap to turn
Her broken cup dry
Holding her belly ache
To her brother’s cry
Look in her soul
by her yearning eyes
Is she asking us
Are we baptised
She will walk and walk for miles
And then walk all the miles back
She will carry what she can carry
Until her little back breaks
For miles and miles
If your neighbour had no water
Would you give their children yours
I know you would for sure
So who is your neighbour?
Who is our neighbour?
Who is my neighbour?
Turn on the tap
And wash your face
Remember your baptism
Jesus grace.
In Uganda in the summer I came face to face, for the first time, with Africa’s dilemma with clean water. Watching children bathing in dirty rivers and carrying huge containers of water from a well or, as they do at Onialeku Primary School, where they were harvesting water off their roofs and again carrying it to a central place in the school.
Fields Of Life do water as much as schools; drilling wells and building tanks for harvesting. Over the summer I coincidently read about children who had never drank clean water. I guess many others don’t have water at all. And we take it all for granted.
This poem/lyric was written with a few influences coming through.
My predecessor in Fitzroy, Ken Newell, told me that Martin Luther had suggested that we remember our baptism every time we wash our face. I like that as a spiritual exercise!
U2’s song Crumbs From Your Table asked a serious question “would you demand for others what you demand for yourself.”
And of course Jesus asked us to love our neighbours as ourselves. That, as I have blogged before, is not a nice sentimental refrain but a revolutionary demand that changes everything we do for others.
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