//water///

It's funny the things your brain finally connects and grasps and makes sense of when you have nothing to do but lay there listlessly watching countless episodes of The Office or think.
Around bedtime one night I was hobbling into the kitchen to rinse out my soup bowl and suddenly something made sense.
We use water for a lot of stuff: drinking, helping plants grow, washing things, etc.
Have you ever thought about water's ability to make things soften?
When you leave a bowl with remnants of food in it and it gets all crusty, what do you do? Fill it with water so you can rinse it out and wash it.
For some reason I'd never really thought about this aspect of water. Even things that we consider "hard"- wood, leather, ginormous books, etc- are softened when waterlogged.

Do you see the spiritual aspect coming here?
Jesus calls himself the Living Water.
John 4 puts it like this: “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.... Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Basically, Jesus is telling this woman that He is God's gift to mankind, that He is able to eternally satisfy our needs for spiritual (and physical) water. 

Can we shorten this to Jesus = water? Maybe that's being a little too free with summarizing the Bible, so sue me.

If Jesus is the spiritual water for us, then it means He has the ability- no, his CHARACTER is to soften that which is hardened. stuck. crusty. 
There are so many times in the Old Testament where God resolves to harden his heart against a person or a people, after their continual disobedience or rebellion. The beautiful part comes when He decides (as He did MANY times) to have mercy and soften his heart toward them once again.
We see him doing this for other people in the Bible as well- one of my favorite instances of which is Ezekiel 36. He's speaking to His Children, the Israelites, and He says: 

"It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. 
And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. 
I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh."

I think that's pretty straightforward. His people have not held up the mightiness and holiness of their God, which is not OK, and he's saying THESE PEOPLE WILL KNOW THAT I AM THE LORD. and this is how:
I will forgive, cleanse, renew, and soften.

I think it's powerful and there's something to be said by the fact that God himself insists that the way people will know and fear Him (even when His own children often don't) is through His forgiveness and ability to soften that which has been hardened by sin.

My heart often gets hardened. By disappointment, by independence, by pride, by expectations. 
I get stuck, my heart gets crusty, and a lot of times I find myself enjoying my ability to sit and revel in my stuck-ness. It's easy there. It's comfortable. No scraping or changing or new things I must learn to handle.
God, somehow, knows the exactly perfect time to say, "Ok, enough is enough. I'm tired of My Name being profaned and other people not knowing that I am the Lord because of your lifestyle.
The time has come for you to be vindicated.
The time has come for you to be cleaned.
The time has come for you to sit in my presence and get soggy and waterlogged and gushy again.

Because if you don't, and you don't change, and you don't start praising my name among the nations again, then one thing that water cannot soften- the ROCKS- will be softened to be able to praise my name.
If you don't, THE ROCKS will cry out. If you aren't, THE ROCKS will be un-hardened. My power is that great, and My name is that worthy."

Let His water-ness soften and change and vindicate you. Let him gushify your crust and unstick you.
Then praise and glorify His name among the nations. Someone has to.