One creature of southwestern Africa is the Stenocara beetle—a little black bug with a grooved, bumpy back. It lives in the Namib Desert, one of the hottest places on earth, where sand temperatures can reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Each day, this small creature climbs a sand dune before dawn and waits for the fog to announce the approaching sunrise. As it waits, tiny droplets of water form on its water-repellent casing. Once the day begins, the beetle bows its head to the ground so that the water can trickle down the waxy grooves of its back and into its mouth. And thus, even in the midst of the inhospitable desert, it receives enough water to sustain it through the day.
Our lives in this world can seem as barren as the hot desert of Namibia, but God continues to sustain us through the living water of his presence. In John 7, Jesus himself promised that whoever was thirsty could come to him and drink—and would find living water that would never run dry.
Jesus invites us to come to him and be refreshed. But all too often we don’t recognize our thirst for what it is. We try to fix our dissatisfaction with busyness, or material things, or friendships, or status—and we remain dissatisfied. May we recognize our thirst for God and quench it with him, never trying to satisfy ourselves with lesser things.
Francine Rivers is a New York Times bestselling novelist who is thrilled to bring readers her first devotional, Earth Psalms: Reflections on How God Speaks through Nature (Tyndale). You can find her online at www.francinerivers.com.
