Thirst Is Not the Same as Gone

He works it out on a Wednesday, in a van, waiting on a bridge for a lift to come down.

It is not a spiritual moment. He is looking at the water and thinking about nothing, and a thought arrives sideways the way the true ones do: I have not looked forward to a Sunday in about two years.

And then he sits with that, because there is nothing else to do on a bridge.

He goes. Every week. He is on the sound desk twice a month and he does the chairs and he knows everybody's name and he means it when he shakes hands. His wife would tell you nothing has changed. His pastor would tell you he is one of the steady ones, and would mean it as a compliment, and it would land on him like a stone.

Because two years ago, or somewhere near it, the anticipation went. Not the belief. Not the attendance. The leaning forward. He used to have a small quiet gladness on a Saturday night about the next morning, and it went out so gradually that there is no week he can point at.

And the sentence he has arrived at, up there on the bridge with the gulls going over, is a hard one. He thinks: something in me died and I did not notice at the time.

The psalm is written from inside the dry place

I want to hand you a psalm, and I want you to read where the man writing it is standing.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

Read the last clause. Not a garden. Not a good season. A dry and thirsty land where no water is. That is the address the psalm is written from, and David is not apologizing for being there and is not explaining how he ended up there.

And now read the middle of it. My soul thirsteth for thee. That is not a man reporting on his refreshment. That is a man reporting on his lack of it, out loud, to God, without dressing it up, and the whole psalm is built on that being an acceptable thing to say.

You are describing the exact conditions this psalm was written in, and it was never written as an accusation against the man in them. That is not me being generous with a text; it is the setting Scripture itself supplies, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line about a waterless land and lays it on a man in a van on a bridge on a Wednesday.

What thirst actually proves

Here is the piece I most want you to have, and it turns on a distinction you have not been making.

You have read your lack of appetite as a death. But look at what you actually noticed on that bridge. You noticed an absence. You felt the shape of something missing. You did not think good, that is dealt with; you thought something has gone, and it landed on you like a weight.

A dead man does not miss his appetite.

Thirst is not the absence of a capacity for water. Thirst is the capacity for water, complaining. It is the loudest possible evidence that the thing is still in you and still wired for what it was made for.

You are thirsty, and thirst is the proof of the very thing you think you have lost. The written word never once treats a longing soul as a departed one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a longing awake in a man for two years while he assumes it has stopped.

And let me say a plain thing about the two years, because the guilt will come for you as soon as you put this down. Dry feeling is not sin. It is not distance and it is not disobedience and it is not a symptom of some hidden thing you have to find. It is a temperature. Bodies get tired. Grief and work and years do this. A man who has carried the same load for a long stretch stops leaning forward, and that is a thing that happens to a person and not a verdict passed on one.

You have not been standing under a judgment for two years, and nobody has been drawing one up. Scripture puts a believer in Christ and holds them there through every season with no clause about appetite, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on that and not an inspector of it.