Meditations from Zion

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.
[I Corinthians 10:1-4]

The theme for this week’s Lenten journey is “Thirst for God.” The Israelites suffered many hardships in the desert, but many of those difficulties they brought onto themselves through griping and complaint which was birthed from distrust. Early on, they were thirsty and cried out to Moses, forgetting the wonder of the parting waters and the Passover night and the plagues which bypassed them in Egypt. They focused on one thing: immediate need for water. And God provided water, despite their complaints, through the striking of a rock by the staff of Moses.

The rock is a symbol for the Christ. And the water, like the water mentioned here, is like the water in John 7:37, a water that quenches the deepest thirst. Water is used again with the woman at the well [John 4] whom Jesus invited to drink of living water and from which a person would no longer thirst again.

Where is my water? Where do I drink?

If anything, I feel more like the Samaritan woman, asking for that living water. Why don’t I feel like I can drink? I am trying to satisfy my inner thirst with the smallest amounts, like dew, floating on the surface. I am not drinking deeply.

My friends, Kathleen and Benedict Schwartz, started and run an orphanage called the Villages of Hope, AKCLI, in Zambia. Mike and I visited there early on in the process and one of their desperate needs was water. The drilling of wells was expensive and frustrating. Just across the road was a resort and golf course with plenty of water while their paltry fields were shriveling. They needed more than a trickle, they needed a gusher. And so they kept drilling, well after well after well until they hit the jackpot.

I don’t want to be satisfied with thimble-fulls of water anymore either. I have grown complacent with my little sips. It’s time to tap into the true groundwater, the lake underneath, the flowing waters of God’s love and renewal.