Parched lives in a dry land...........

The first thing exercise gurus will tell you is to drink plenty of water.  You need it more than you think.  As you move and sweat and work you will need more.  Your body needs it even if your brain hasn't registered that fact yet.

Water.  A colleague tells of his foray into regular exercise as a Lenten discipline 10 years ago.....and he begins his story with water.  You need water, he was told; "rivers of it, here, drink deeply."


Then he asks the question,  "How often have we acknowledged how parched our lives are? How we thirst for God?  I had a sense that something was lacking in me, and I could tell you what it wasn't, but I needed a guide, a coach, a person of grace to tell me what it was."  Water?  God?  Both?

The psalmist writes, "O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water."  Ps 63

Jesus tells the Samaritan woman at the well, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.  The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." John 4

When he has gathered his disciples, including Judas who would betray him and Peter who would deny him, he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet ...." John 13

Then from the cross he says, "I am thirsty." John 19

The water that is essential to life is but an earthly reminder of the God who is essential to true life. Jesus taught us what we already know; then he lived and died in that essential relationship with his Father God.

Drink deeply.  Rivers of living water.

                                                                                                                      Many thanks to Pr. Craig Herrick for these images.