When Jesus Sees the Wounded

There are certain passages in Scripture that stay with us long after we've finished reading them. For me, John 4 has always been one of those passages. The Samaritan woman arrives at the well carrying a history no one else fully understands. Before Jesus speaks to her about living water or reveals himself as the Messiah, he sees her. Not simply the choices she had made or the reputation she carried, but the woman herself. I've often wondered what her life looked like before that moment. What losses had shaped her? What disappointments had taught her to stop hoping? What had brought her to that well on that particular day?

Those questions became deeply personal to me because there was a season when I needed to know whether God truly saw me too. Leaving an abusive marriage was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. I had to learn what it meant to trust my heavenly Father when so much of my world felt uncertain. It wasn't courage that carried me through those years as much as it was discovering that my Abba was faithful, present, and strong enough to hold me when I no longer had strength of my own.

Healing begins when we discover we are fully seen and fully loved.

That discovery changed the way I read Scripture. I began noticing how often God draws near to people whose lives have been marked by grief, rejection, fear, or shame. He doesn't rush past their pain. He meets them in it, and from that place begins the work of redemption. Healing rarely happens all at once. More often, it comes through countless quiet moments of learning to trust him again, allowing him to restore what seemed beyond repair.

As I researched the world of first-century Samaria and imagined the untold years of the woman at the well, I realized I wasn't simply writing historical fiction. I was writing about the God who still enters broken stories. Adva's journey became a way of exploring questions that many of us have asked in one form or another: Does God see me? Does he understand what I've carried? Can he redeem the parts of my story that feel impossible to restore?

My hope is that readers will find more than an engaging story in the Daughter of Samaria series. I hope they encounter the same God who met a wounded woman beside an ordinary well and revealed that she had never been forgotten. That truth continues to give me hope, and it is the hope I pray every reader carries with them long after they turn the final page.

— Jeanette Brewer