Thirst

Kenneth E. Bailey, who spent 40 years living and teaching New Testament in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cyprus, writes:

While living in the south of Egypt, a group of friends and I traveled deep into the Sahara Desert by camel. As our trek began, the temperature soared to above 110° Fahrenheit in the shade, and there was no shade. On our way, one goat-skin water bag leaked all of its precious contents. With consumption high due to the heat, we ran out of water, and for a day and a half we pressed on while enduring intense thirst.

The goal of the excursion was a famous well named Bir Shaytoun, deep in the desert. Our guide promised us that it was never dry — ah, but could we survive to reach its life-giving liquid silver? My mouth became completely dry, and eating was impossible, because swallowing felt like the rubbing of two pieces of sandpaper together. My vision became blurred, and the struggle to keep moving became harder with each step. We knew that if the well was dry, our armed guards would probably have forcibly seized our three baggage camels, and ridden them back to the valley, leaving the rest of us to die.

As I staggered on, my mind turned to this verse ["Blessed are those who … thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled"]. I knew that I had never sought righteousness with the same single-minded passion that I now gave to the quest for water.

Editor’s Note: The group did manage to stagger to the well, and it was full of “the wine of God,” as water is named by desert tribesmen in the Middle East.

Singer/Songwriter Sandra McCracken writes in CT magazine:

There’s a call button above every seat on commercial airplanes. In all my travels, I don’t think I’ve ever used it. I’m not sure if that is due to shyness or to pride, as there have certainly been times when I acutely needed help while seated.

While traveling recently, for example, I endured some delays and was thirsty. Yet I waited to ask for anything until the plane reached 10,000 feet, when the flight attendants came row by row to grant our drink requests. I didn’t press the call button. It always seems more courteous to wait.

As Jesus hung on the Cross, one of the last phrases he spoke out loud was “I am thirsty” (John 19:28). This three-word inclusion in the Gospels is a subtle yet significant acknowledgment of Jesus’ human need. His thirst dignifies our humanity. He offered up this holy complaint, a declaration of his physical need. He pushed the call button.

God is the one who is responsible to supply our needs (Ps. 23:1; Phil. 4:19). Jesus invites us to participate, to receive, and to ask. Sometimes we are to ask and ask again (Luke 11:9; 18:1–8).

Jesus invites us to hit the call button. And he invites us to wait for him, sometimes well beyond when the plane has reached 10,000 feet. Ask and wait. Hope and receive. The springs of living water that he gives will never run dry.

In the classic French film Jean de Florette, townspeople in a small village in Provence, France conspire against a local landowner named Jean who has just inherited a plot of land. They want to force Jeans's little farm to fail so they can possess the land. The land receives only scant rainfall so they sneak on to his property and plug a healthy stream, cementing it shut and covering it with dirt.

Jean does not know about the nearby spring, but he knows of another, more distant water supply over a mile away. He initially makes progress, but eventually getting the water and dragging it from the distant spring becomes a backbreaking experience. Sadly, he never discovers that he already has an inexhaustible supply of water underground but nearby.

Possible Preaching Angles: Holy Spirit; God, power of—In the same way, Christians have an inexhaustible supply of power—the Holy Spirit—living within us. Sadly, some of us are like Jean in this film—you spend our lives in backbreaking effort trying to haul another supply.

The town of East Porterville may be the hardest-hit place in California's punishing drought. Of its 7,300 people, almost 1,000 have no running water. Groundwater levels have plunged by 60 feet or more in some spots, and tens of thousands of wells are in danger. But few knew that until 72-year-old Donna Johnson started driving around town and asking neighbors, "Hi. Do you have water?" Again and again, the answer was no.

When Johnson's well ran dry in June, she and her husband had no idea they were part of something bigger. "I guess I was just oblivious to how bad it had gotten," she said. But that changed when she started stopping to listen. At the local gas station, for instance, she tuned into conversations and kept hearing, "So-and-so's well ran dry."

In July, Johnson decided to put together a list of people out of water in East Porterville. The local paper ran an article that gave her phone number and address and said she was collecting bottled water for drought victims. The next day there were pallets of plastic bottles under her tarp carport. Johnson recruited a neighbor to make the deliveries. The calls from people needing water came as quickly as the donated bottles.

Families would call at midnight and say "We're completely out of water" and she'd go and take some. When she drove up to one local driveway she asked her typical question: "Hi, do you have water?" "A little," a woman named Veronica said. "But if two people take a shower, it's done." Eight people live in the small, water-deprived home. After the Johnson dropped off the water they told her, "Thank you for the water. We didn't know where to go. We're grateful."

Adie Johnson, who serves on the staff of a small church in Colorado as Pastor of Spiritual Formation, shares a few thoughts about the power of group solitude:

I have found that one of the most powerful tools God has used to sculpt me in my spiritual life has been solitude, extended times set aside to be just with God. It was nearly 15 years ago that an older woman at the church I attended invited me to join her and others going to a park to spend a half day in prayer. I remember thinking I was pretty sure I couldn't pray for that long, but still, something about it drew me. Perhaps it was the compelling, gentle spirit of the woman who invited me.

That clear, fall morning beside the Chesapeake Bay would change the direction of my journey with Jesus irrevocably. With very simple instructions, my friend sent us off with a Bible, a journal, and what felt like all the time in the world. Once I figured out that I didn't need to speak to God nonstop for the next three hours, I settled into a listening mode that was new and surprisingly comfortable. Unbeknownst to me, God began that day to answer a prayer I had uttered to him a few months earlier: "Lord, help me to hear and recognize your voice. I just want to know it's you."

In those three hours, God, in his lovingly tender way, began to teach me just that—how to listen to him. Like Elijah in 1 Kings 19, I discovered that God sounds much more like a soft whisper blowing through my heart than a raging wind tearing apart the mountains. It was an unimaginably rich experience for me, and it has only grown richer and deeper since then.

In the last few years, I have begun to do my own invitations to others to solitude. …

Group solitude may sound like an oxymoron, but like most new experiences in life, we humans prefer to try things with a friend. When I take a group on solitude, we carpool to a retreat center together, chatting and enjoying conversation all the way there. Once we get there, we split up to our various rooms alone and respect silence until we meet up together for lunch. After lunch we decide who wants to take a hike together or some other activity and who wants more time alone. No judgment is placed on either decision; we simply follow our hearts and wish each other well. Committing to dates and traveling together has been a great way to help each other make this spiritual discipline a priority.

Condensed from our sister publication Gifted for Leadership, a Christianity Today International blog © 2008 Christianity Today International.

Nancy Spiegelberg writes in Our Daily Bread:

Lord, I crawled across the bareness to you with my empty cup, uncertain in asking any small drop of refreshment. If only I had known you better. I'd have come running with a bucket.

On July 30, 1945, the battle cruiser USS Indianapolis was returning from a mission delivering enriched uranium to allied forces in the Pacific. It did not make it home. A Japanese torpedo hit the cruiser on its way back. It sank in minutes. In only 12 minutes, 300 of the 1,200 men died. Nine hundred went into the water, enduring four days and five nights without food, without water, and under the blazing sun of the Pacific. Of the 900 men that went into the water, only 316 survived the lack of water and the sharks. One of those who survived was the chief medical officer, who recorded his own experience. He wrote:

There was nothing I could do, nothing I could do but give advice, bury the dead at sea, save the lifejackets, and try to keep the men from drinking the water. When the hot sun came out, and we were in this crystal clear ocean, we were so thirsty. You couldn't believe it wasn't good enough to drink. I had a hard time convincing the men they shouldn't drink. The real young ones…you take away their hope, you take away their water and food, they would drink the salt water and they would go fast. I can remember striking the ones who were drinking the salt water to try to stop them. They would get dehydrated, then become maniacal. There were mass hallucinations. I was amazed how everyone would see the same thing. One man would see something, and then everyone else would see it. Even I fought the hallucinations off and on. Something always brought me back.

Cast Away is the story of Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) a top engineer for FedEx. While flying over the South Pacific, a violent storm damages the company jet causing it to slam into the ocean. Noland survives the crash, but everyone else aboard is killed. Clinging to a yellow life raft, he rides out the raging storm and washes up on a small deserted island. For the next four years he struggles to survive before escaping the island and returning to civilization.

The day after Noland first sets foot on the island, the only concern greater than his fear is his desperate need for water. He is dangerously thirsty. After he discovers coconuts falling from the trees, Noland frantically attempts to open one. He repeatedly throws a coconut against a boulder, but the hard shell is unmarked. Using all his strength, he pounds the coconut with a rock but without success. He tries to drill a hole into one and then flies into a fury when he still cannot access the juice locked inside the fibrous seed.

Eventually he employs a sharp rock as an axe and is able to cut into and remove the outer husk. Left with the hard shell, he finally breaks it open only to watch as most of the milky juice spills out on the ground. Noland lifts up a fragment of the shell and drains the few remaining drops of liquid into his mouth.

How like our spiritual thirst, as we desperately seek to find satisfaction. Jesus promises to fulfill our longings and declares, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink."

Content: Rated PG-13 for intense action sequences

Elapsed Time: 00:40:02 to 00:42:20 (DVD chapter 11)

Pat Summerall, the well known sports announcer, overcame alcoholism and became a follower of Christ in his late sixties. He said this about water baptism: "I went down in the water, and when I came up it was like a 40-pound weight had been lifted from me. I have a happier life, a healthy life, and a more positive feeling about life than ever before."

About prayer meetings and Bible studies Summerall comments: "It's like an alcoholic looking for a drink. If he wants it bad enough, he can find it—no matter what. I'm like that when it comes to finding prayer services and Bible studies. No matter where I am working, I know that they're out there and I can find them."

Pastor and writer A. W. Tozer lacked even a high-school education, but he read the great Christian mystics and theologians until he could read and write about them with facility. Tozer challenges:

Come near to the holy men and women of the past, and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him, the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking. Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing Him better. "Now therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight"; and from there he rose to make the daring request, "I beseech thee, show me thy glory." God was frankly pleased by this display of ardor, and the next day called Moses into the mount, and there in solemn procession made all His glory pass before him.

In his book Sahara Unveiled, William Langewiesche tells the story of an Algerian named Lag Lag and a companion whose truck broke down while crossing the desert:

They nearly died of thirst during the three weeks they waited before being rescued. As their bodies dehydrated, they became willing to drink anything in hopes of quenching their terrible thirst. The sun forced them into the shade under the truck, where they dug a shallow trench. Day after day they lay there. They had food, but did not eat, fearing it would magnify their thirst. Dehydration, not starvation, kills wanderers in the desert, and thirst is the most terrible of all human sufferings.

Physiologists use Greek-based words to describe stages of human thirst. For example, the Sahara is dipsogenic, meaning "thirst provoking."

In Lag Lag's case, they might say he progressed from eudipsia, "ordinary thirst," through bouts of hyperdipsia, meaning "temporary intense thirst," to polydipsia, "sustained excessive thirst." Polydipsia means the kind of thirst that drives one to drink anything. There are specialized terms for such behavior, including uriposia, the drinking of urine, and hemoposia, the drinking of blood.

For word enthusiasts, this is heady stuff. Nevertheless, the lexicon has not kept up with technology. I have tried, and cannot coin a suitable word for the drinking of rusty radiator water. Radiator water is what Lag Lag and his assistant started into when good drinking water was gone. In order to survive, they were willing to drink, in effect, poison.

Many people do something similar in the spiritual realm. They depend on things like money, sex, and power to quench spiritual thirst. Unfortunately, such "thirst quenchers" are in reality spiritual poison, a dangerous substitute for the "living water" Jesus promised.

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water…. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably, earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing."

Conversion is hardly safe. After all, it requires approaching the King of the Universe, face to face. In his book The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis draws an analogy with the story of a young girl named Jill. She's in the land of Narnia, and she's thirsty. At once she sees a magnificent stream . . . and a fearsome lion (Aslan, who represents the Lord Jesus):

"If I run away, it'll be after me in a moment," thought Jill. "And if I go on, I shall run straight into its mouth." Anyway, she couldn't have moved if she had tried, and she couldn't take her eyes off it. How long this lasted, she could not be sure; it seemed like hours. And the thirst became so bad that she almost felt she would not mind being eaten by the Lion if only she could be sure of getting a mouthful of water first. . . .

"Are you not thirsty?" said the Lion.

"I'm dying of thirst," said Jill.

"Then drink," said the Lion.

"May I, would you mind going away while I do?" said Jill.

The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience. The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.

"Will you promise not to do anything to me, if I do come?" said Jill.

"I make no promise," said the Lion.

Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer. "Do you eat girls?" she said.

"I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms," said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.

"I daren't come and drink," said Jill.

"Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.

"Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer. "I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."

"There is no other stream," said the Lion. It never occurred to Jill to disbelieve the Lion, no one who had seen his stern face could do that, and her mind suddenly made itself up.

It was the worst thing she had ever had to do, but she went straight to the stream, knelt down, and began scooping up water in her hand. It was the coldest, most refreshing water she had ever tasted. You didn't need to drink much of it, for it quenched your thirst at once. Before she tasted it she had been intending to make a dash away from the Lion the moment she had finished. Now, she realized that this would be on the whole the most dangerous thing of all.

During times of revival ... prayer flows more easily. Preaching is more powerful. Guidance is more vivid. In contrast at other times we learn the tougher lessons of walking by naked faith in the Word. This may partly explain why times of revival alternate with times of spiritual drought. Certainly we learn lessons in drought that could never be learned in a cloudburst. But who would want to settle for permanent drought?