Tag: Thirst

On the Spot, Watching

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A tree can’t thrash its branches;
it waits for the wind to move them.
I can manufacture neither poems nor spiritual power,
but my task is to be on the spot, watching,
ready when the breeze picks up.
~Luci Shaw from Breath for the Bones

 

I awake as a gust unlatches our front door ajar,
blinds clattering over screened windows
yawning open for months;
raindrops blowing everywhere,
sucked up with a thirst
unknown by this soil before.

I thirst too~
sweat-dried from a too-long summer,
eager to be tasked with watching
this amazing change
to be moved as it passes by,
bowed and bent by its power.

breezepoplar

breezebirch

 

A World Planted in Pennies

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If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity,
so that finding a penny will literally make your day,
then,
since the world is in fact planted in pennies,
you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Planted pennies
on days like today
are like raindrops,
just as plain and more than plentiful.
When I’m feeling dry and withered
I only need to look up into gray skies
and all the drops fill my bank
and hydrate my soul, lost in wilderness.
The desert flows, my thirst is quenched
by something so simple, so underwhelming,
so enriching
as pennies and raindrops.

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Lenten Grace — A Table in the Wilderness

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…faith finds food in famine, and a table in the wilderness.
In the greatest danger, faith says, “I have a great God.”
When outward strength is broken, faith rests on the promises.
In the midst of sorrow, faith draws the sting out of every trouble,
and takes out the bitterness from every affliction.
~Richard Cecil

The table set for us in the wilderness may not be what we hope for nor expect. Only faith can sustain us when the cup is bitter and the meal disheartening. We may choose starvation and thirst rather than eat and drink of trouble and sacrifice.

Even Jesus asked that the cup be taken from Him. Yet He drank from it and handed it over to us.

Even as Jesus walked to Golgotha, breaking under the burden and about to be shattered, He is prepared to hand His body over to us.

He has eaten at this same table so we are no longer alone in the bitter wilderness.

And so we, sharing our hunger, our thirst, our fear, our sorrow and our pain, can say, “We have a great God.”

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Advent Sings: Spring Up, O Well

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

16 From there they continued on to Beer, the well where the Lord said to Moses, “Gather the people together and I will give them water.”
17 Then Israel sang this song:
“Spring up, O well!
    Sing about it,
18 about the well that the princes dug,
    that the nobles of the people sank—
    the nobles with scepters and staffs.”
Numbers 21: 16-18

Like the homeless Israelites of the wilderness years, we are prone to grumble as we wander through life.  Despite our many struggles, we are provided with what is needed when it is needed, day to day, to live.  In Numbers, ancient Israel sang of the wellspring of water that seemed to appear in the desert, no matter where they were,  in answer to their desperate pleading.    The wells of the ancients provided for their bodily needs, through God’s provision of water to the parched.

So too we are surrounded in the desert of modern society, desperately thirsty and needy for something, anything that will sustain us.  Our groanings and grumblings are answered, overflowing:

“The poor and needy search for water,
    but there is none;
    their tongues are parched with thirst.
But I the Lord will answer them;
    I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
18 I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
    and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
    and the parched ground into springs.
Isaiah 41: 17-18

The deepest well of all was born that night in Bethlehem, producing an endless stream of life flowing through the dry and dying landscape of human suffering and sin.   It was as if he had sprung up from the desert, miraculously appearing when desperately needed by the people.

10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
John 4: 10-15

Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for a drink at the well although he was the deep wellspring himself.    He dwells with us and like us,  needing the basics of water that can never truly satisfy.  He knows our body’s thirst as he feels just as we do.  Yet in responding to his bodily thirst,  we are engaged as never before, finding in him the quenching of our spiritual thirst.

Though Jesus needed nurturing and provision while on earth–as a helpless and hungry infant dependent on his parents, as a wandering teacher in the desert thirsty from the long hot miles, and hanging from the cross suffering from thirst and asking from relief–he is the deepest well from which we can possibly draw.

Let us sing of it this Advent.

Lenten Reflection–Thirsty

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photo by Josh Scholten

Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.”
John 19:28

God thirsts to be thirsted after.
Augustine
I may be mistaken, but I think this is the only statement Jesus makes in the Gospel that reflects his bodily need. During his years of ministry, he doesn’t complain about a headache or backache, or sore feet, or a bad cold or feeling hungry. In one story, the writer John says Jesus is tired after a journey to Samaria where he sits down to rest at noon and asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water from the well. As they talk, she asks for “living water” from him–her thirst, despite having easy access to a well, exceeds his.

So it is from the cross. He has extreme thirst, no question. He is offered vinegar on a sponge–hardly an answer to thirst–what we offer to him in his need is not worthy of spit. We stand beneath the cross with our own unquenchable thirst–unsatisfied by money or gadgets or status or power or pleasure or gallons of drink– that is slaked only as this man offers himself to us.

He tells us of his thirst so we remember our own deep need, unmet and unsatisfied until “it is finished.”

Only then we drink freely and deeply.