As the deer pants for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. Psalm 42:1
In the dog days of the sweltering summer when I was ten years old, my family drove across the Mojave Desert to go camping at the Grand Canyon. Our Chevrolet sedan had no air conditioning. The blacktop ahead of us softened in the heat, shimmering surrealistically.
Mom and Dad were up front, Dad driving; my three younger brothers and I were crammed into the backseat. A couple weeks earlier we had coerced a stray German shepherd-like mutt to follow us home. We begged Mom until she let us keep him, and we named him Bruno. Now Bruno was lying next to the back window, panting incessantly, his white fur floating around in the car and sticking to my skin. My fingers were so swollen with the heat that I couldn’t remove a souvenir ring I’d bought. My tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth.
That night at ten-thirty we pulled into Blythe, California, where the thermometer on the bank read ninety degrees. We sighted an A&W Root Beer sign and turned into the parking lot. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything as good as the frosty mug of root beer I quaffed there.
In Psalm 42 the psalmist speaks of a longing for God so intense it’s like a dry-mouthed thirst on a scorching day. He grieves the fact that he can’t be at the temple in Jerusalem. Why is he estranged from his spiritual home? Perhaps he wrote from exile, cut off in Babylon from the place where he found God to be most authentically present.
Wherever he was, far from home, the psalmist cries out, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so I long for you, O God.” Do we have that same thirst, that same intense desire for the presence of God?
The psalmist says we need to become aware of our deep thirst for the living God. God is to the soul what water is to the body, and our thirst bears witness to our need. When we tire of the aridity of our culture, when we despair over our own dryness, when we grow discouraged over the seeming distance of God, all we can do is cry out to God. That’s a good place to begin, for God is the one who puts that thirst in us.
We were made to be satisfied with the Living Water. And if we recognize our thirst, we are blessed, because God is able to satisfy
—Randal C. Working
Reflection
What makes me aware of my desire for God? What helps me quench that thirst?
Prayer
Lord, you who alone can satisfy, I long to come into your presence.
“In God’s time and in God’s way the desert will give way to a land flowing with milk and honey. And as we wait for that promised land of the soul, we can echo the prayer of Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Oh my God, deep calls unto deep (Ps. 42:7). The deep of my profound misery calls to the deep of your infinite mercy.'”
—Richard Foster, writer
Leadership DevotionsCopyright Tyndale House Publishers.Used by permission.
