To my mind, water tastes best this way, especially spring water or really cold well water, and most especially in the middle of the night, when you've gotten up to go to the bathroom and find you're really thirsty:

You run the cold tap until the water is as cold as it's going to get. You then cup your hand slightly, fingers squeezed side-by-each, and put your fingertips under the tap, letting the water run into your cupped palm. Bending over, you put your lips to the small icy puddle in your palm and shlurp the water up, gulping it down.

It occurred to me, about 4 a.m. while I was getting myself a drink this way, that part of the beauty of this arrangement is that you have no idea how much water you're ingesting. If you drink from a cup or glass, you know what you've taken in, 8 fluid ounces or 300 milliliters or whatever. You can even track how many drinks of water you've had that day, if you're so inclined – I believe it's supposed to be at least 6 glasses per day, isn't it? But if you drink from the palm of your hand, you drink because you were thirsty and you stop when you feel you've had enough, and who knows how much that is? Nobody's measuring.

You drink casually, but with intensity. It's homage to your animal self, because you don't suck water from a glass as you do from that tiny pool in your palm. Your hand's a big part of the process – maybe it flavors the water a little? All of you's involved in the process; the backs of your legs stretch as you bend down, your back creaks a little, you brace your free hand on the edge of the bathroom sink, squaring your shoulders. The cold seeps into your palm and fingers until they ache a little. Your toes curl slightly as you concentrate on the water, and you dig your heels down, adjusting your balance. If you have long hair, it may swing down around your face, a dry tickling presence. If you're half-awake, as I was, you may find yourself making little sighs and grunts as you drink, like a baby nursing. It's an animal process, a whole-body business, this type of drinking, nothing neat or mannerly about it.

Water and God's grace always seem to me to be much alike: the fluidity and elegance of them, the in-yer-face selfhood of them, their incompressability, the way they both keep slipping out from our control, our utter unspoken (and mostly unrecognized) dependence on them for survival. Our need is so great, and we're so afraid of letting it show--that's why we prefer drinking from glasses to drinking from hands, because you can make real deep Need look like mere Isn't-This-Nice if you're sipping genteelly from a glass instead of sucking up water from your palm, head down like an animal. If we faced, for a moment, the depth and breadth of our neediness of God, I think our egos would crumble into tiny dry crumbs; we'd be left with nothing but our mere selves, our souls and bodies, and oh, is that scary!

I suppose I could stand here all night, if I could stay awake so long, letting water run through my fingers until they turned white and shriveled with immersion as I watched. I could do that, but because the capacity of my well to take in water is greater than the capacity of the bathroom tap to let it run out, there'd still be water running in the morning. I could run the tap indefinitely, and while the well pump might give out, the well itself wouldn't. It's a good well, and the bathroom tap's too puny.

My well is, after all drawing on all the water in the world, a huge mass composed of compartments vast and tiny--everything from the water locked in a flea's eye to the massive Antarctic icecap, from your left pinkie fingernail to the depths of the huge Pacific. It might take more time than my house, my well, and myself have in this life for that water to get here, but it's still part of the great aqueous scheme of things. Billions and billions of tons of water, swirling in a great gyre over the face of this earth, through the dance of life, and the tiniest part of it trickles out of a tap and into the palm of my hand, there for my need and refreshment in the wee small hours.

And all that water is as a tiny fragment of a drop in the palm of God's hand. God's love, unlike this water, is utterly limitless--infinite in scope, endless in space and time. We can no more control it than we can make a river stop still, or send the rain back to the heavens, or erase the snowcaps, or turn the oceans upside down. It's not ours to own and direct, much as we'd like to make it so.

What, then, makes us think we can deny God's grace to anyone? Especially when we're gulping it down ourselves, with not a thought of where it all comes from, without attending to how much we're taking in – too muddled and full of our own needs to care how much we take or to think much about how much is given us. We are all tired, thirsty children needing a drink of water in the middle of the night. But God delights in giving us to drink; God rejoices at our acceptance of this cool, sweet refreshment. As for us, all we can do is mutter "thanks" and take what it is we need to live.

I must learn to think more often, when I gulp down a palmful of water, how great this grace is. I must remember the millions who live without this blessing of clean, fresh, safe water, calling to mind the huge ancient labour (women's work, almost always) of drawing and carrying water, tons of water, one heavy jug at a time. I must never, ever take this stuff for granted – neither water, or grace. But I must live with the blessing of it simply and unselfconsciously, for I can do nothing to deserve it.

My feet were starting to freeze, and I remembered I had to get up in the morning, so I dried my mouth and hands and went back to bed, thanks-giving.