How to drink

I walked in just now dripping wet to get a drink. I don’t even want to dry off, the water feels so good, cool beads down my neck, my back, puddles at my feet. Now, I sip ice water and at the simple joy of thirst quenched. I can feel the water hydrating my cells almost immediately.

Refreshing can happen so fast. From scorched to soaked, in an instant. Such a picture of what’s happening inside:

A return to the well.

I’d been swimming around, still, in Psalm 63. Still struck by the imagery, the thirsting and longing, then the joy and deep satisfaction. I knew something had been off. Prayer felt forced, rote, tasks joyless, writing laborious, even my sacred mundane seemed stagnant, uneventful. All the needs around me, all those leaning into me, all the straws sucking me dry, I started to resent them.

We can return to the well in an instant, but how do we drink? How? Too often I  swing between “going hard for God” mode and then “rest and do what I want” mode. Rest is good, but selfishness leaves us emptier than ever. “Me first” will suck us drier than a thousand straws.

How do we drink?

I sat, out, in the sun, while the kids ran off to play. Something kept me from opening the laptop again. Although there are speaking notes to finish and preparations to be made, something urged me back to The Heavenly Man. I opened to my place, and could barely believe what I read:

“Because I’d been operating in my own strength for months, I was physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted. My spiritual eyesight had grown dim and my hearing dull. Pride has sprung up in my heart like a choking weed. Instead of obeying God’s voice, I reasoned with human logic and based my decisions on my own wisdom. …

… Working for God had taken the place of loving God. … I was still getting up every morning at five o’clock and praying, and I was still reading my Bible every day, but I was doing these things out of obligation and habit, and not from a willing heart flowing from my relationship with Jesus. (184)

My eyes widened. I literally could have written those exact words myself. There is nothing like reading your own confession laid out by another honest, humble soul who’s brave enough to go first. It’s a gift to others when we confess our sin one to another, even through the pages of a book. Through it, we’re healed.

That was it. How to drink: It sounds strange, but you have to swallow.

Sure, for many of us, we never go to the well. We wander around looking for satisfaction in a thousand other places, never quite quenching our soul’s thirst because we never go to the Source.

But then, some of us, we go to the well. But we’re always going to there, subconsciously, for someone else. We fill our buckets and maybe even our mouths, and we lug those impossibly heavy water-cans all the way home so we can quench the thirst of someone else. We, like Mama birds, empty even our own mouth’s water into the tiny upturned souls of our children.

And then, the next day, we do it again. Endless trips to the well, lugging buckets of water back for the others.

And we forget to drink.

We forget to swallow. We forget to pause and lift the bucket to our own souls and drink, long and deep, as much as we can, until we can drink no more.

We don’t have to worry that there won’t be enough to bring home.

The well never runs dry. 

But if we never drink, we’ll die. Spiritually we cannot keep only fetching water for other souls.

We must stop … repent …

and drink.

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. (Is. 55:1)

{Thank you for reading.}