Christmas in Ohio passed in a deluge of rain.
Now the house trembles under a winter wind, but still no snow. Yesterday I
leaned against my thinking tree near the neighbor’s pasture and wondered if I
could walk far enough to find snow. Surely, deep in those woods, on the banks
of the icy creek, perhaps, I would find something white.
This longing for snow is something
children feel, I know, but I don’t want to let it go. Snow covers the world
while I am sleeping and wakes me to a new, magical land full of diamonds and
piercing blue sky. But when the new magical land comes, it only makes way for
more longing.
Spring is pure, green life,
stirring tired dreams and awakening the hearts that dream them. But when our
dreams are finally awakened, we reach for the long, slow, steady be-ing of Summer.
And once we find it, our hopes
move on to the brilliant, wild, chaotic ending of Fall. Or perhaps they remain in
the warm magic of Summer, or Spring’s delicate life. Our longing always finds a
place from which it can call us.
Our search to fill our longing and
thirst is relentless and all-consuming.
The seasons are a universal
demonstration of change and how it affects man. God didn’t create the earth or
its inhabitants to remain static. He promises this in Genesis 8:22, after the
great Flood: “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and
heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” Like the earth
seeking to move through cold and heat, we will always strive for fulfillment. We
will stop when we die, either because we have been completed by the God of our
dreams, or we have been cut off from fulfillment forever. We never really do
anything for no reason. We are always trying, if subconsciously, to find the
piece that will finish us. (I say finish instead of complete because we will
truly be finished, dead to this world, when we find that piece.)
Jesus, the water-bringer,
understood this endless thirst. He says, in John 4, “But whosoever drinketh of
the water I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give
him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”
That sounds gloriously beautiful.
The woman listening to Jesus thought so too. “Sir, give me this water, that I
thirst not, neither come hither to draw,” she said.
Quench my thirst, she cried. We
all cry this, though sometimes we don’t know who we’re crying to. Whether we
are purely pursuing God with our relationships and creating and working, or just
desperately searching for any kind of
fulfillment, he is there, anyway. “If I take the wings of the morning, and
dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and
thy right hand shall hold me.” Psalm 139:8,9.
We can find God even on the wings
of the morning and in the uttermost parts of the sea. Sometimes we may have to
go there so we can forget that nothing lies between us and the one who quenches
our thirst. We can find him in every breath of every day, for he is always
there, water dripping from his cupped hands.
When I can forget that nothing
lies between us, I devour stories because I know I will see God move in them,
or where he could move if invited. I choose words carefully and arrange them
because in the creation of story and essay and word picture I invite him to
work in me. I pour my life into loving my fiancé not only because he’s the man
I love best in the world, but also because I find God in him more than in any
other.
What does God use to bring water
to you? Please leave a comment below and
let me know. It can be the most mundane things…God lives in water fountains too,
I have discovered.
