Do you find
it hard to thirst for God? The image is
nice, but the reality is harder to experience.
Why is it so easy to get distracted from the experience of quenching our
thirst for God? It seems that everything
else takes precedence. The one
experience that will bring priority and wisdom to all other realities in this
world is a connection to God, yet it is the hardest to maintain. It’s so much easier to connect to the stack
of bills that must be attended to or the trash that needs to be collected
before the priority of thirsting for God.
How did
David stay so focused? He was running
from enemies that he knew he had no strength to conquer. If we have any hope of thirsting for God, we
must begin with humility. Perhaps the reason
that all the other things take precedence is because we feel adequate to do
those things. We don’t thirst for God to
show us how to order up our day; rather we dig in and in the digging forget
that He is there at all.
What made a
saint a saint was their insatiable hunger for God. No matter how disconnected they felt from
God, they believed that He would not give up, always thirsting for God. We are like the saints. In reality we too
should all find ourselves thirsty. In
fact, most of us have reached the point of dehydration when it comes to
God. Think of your hydration level for
God right now in this moment. Where are
you on a scale of drinking fully to on the brink of dehydration? Just thinking about God right now connects
you to His living waters in your soul.
Does it wake you up to the reality that your soul is in desperate need
of connection to God? Do you feel the hope of slight quenching of your thirst?
Everyone
wants to thirst for God, but not everyone remains open to the nourishing waters
He longs to pour into our souls (Romans 5:5--And hope does not put us to shame, because
God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been
given to us.) Our awareness of our
thirst for God begins with our humility.
We awake to our foolishness in placing all that we prioritize above God
and then finding ourselves thirsty. When
we become aware of our thirst for God we may feel that we are in a desert with
no oasis in sight, yet we must cling to hope that our thirst can be fulfilled.
Another
reason we tune out to our thirst for God is that our thirst seems so
unquenchable. The saints failed over and
over to fully receive all that God wanted to pour into them, but they kept
getting back up. We are so far from the way
God intends us to think, feel and experience in this world. It is slow progress to become fully
restored. We turn back too easily.
Francis Fernandez exhorts: Let us develop these desires with the virtue
of hope: one can only effectively desire something when there is hope of
attainting it. If we consider some aim to be impossible and not for us, we will
not really desire it; our theological hope rests on God[i].
Psalm 63:1 says: God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary
land where there is no water. Let’s
humbly recognize that what our souls thirst for is not found in this dry and
weary land. We need humility and hope in
order to earnestly seek God‘s satisfaction for our thirst.
[i]
Frances Fernandez, In Conversation with God (Book 2), ( Scepter: New York, 1987)
p. 431.
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