"Betwixt & Between: On the Threshold of Stranger & Friend"

John 4:5–10, 15-19, 25-26
So Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by the journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to Jesus, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to Jesus, “Sir I see that you are a prophet.”

The woman said to Jesus, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “Having come, that one will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am that very one.”

Acts 9:19b-28 The Inclusive Bible
Saul stayed with believers in Damascus for a few days, and soon began proclaiming in the synagogues that Jesus was the Only Begotten of God.

Everyone who heard Saul was amazed. They said, “Isn’t this the one who wiped out those in Jerusalem who called on the name of Jesus? Didn’t Saul come here just so he could bring them in chains before the chief priests?”

But Saul kept growing in strength and confounding the Jewish authorities in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.

After many days had gone by, the Jewish authorities plotted together to do away with him, but Saul learned of their plot. They were watching the city gates day and night trying to put him to death, but one night his students came and got him and had him escape through an opening in the wall, lowering him to the ground in a basket.

When Saul arrived back in Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples there, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he was a disciple. Then Barnabas took charge of him, and introduced him to the apostles. He explained to them, how, on his journey, Saul had seen and conversed with Jesus , and how ever since that encounter, Saul had been speaking out fearlessly in the name of Jesus at Damascus.