The Discipline of Spiritual Thirst

This is the final discipline on my list of 'Ten Disciplines for living downstream from Eden' - a proposal for a personal and global water ethic - or what I call a 'Manifesto for Action' at the end of my book.

Eight hundred million people in our world suffer with severe water scarcity; their need is physical and very real. Often, the water they do collect serves them badly and makes them chronically sick. Click here for a short but powerful 3-minute video from Charity: Water that tells this story.

Physical thirst is a painful but eloquent mirror to us of the spiritual thirst deep in human souls and human communities – a thirst and a soul-sickness found not only in drought-stricken deserts and ghettos, but in affluent suburbs and tropical resorts as well.
People everywhere are thirsting for God. The Bible names this deep yearning in the soul and urges us to embrace Jesus as the ultimate source of living water and to nourish our souls in his

grace – and to beware of fraudulent alternatives.

There are countless exhilarating substitutes on offer everywhere you look in our downstream world, siren voices that promise but ultimately cannot satisfy our souls. It takes courage to recognize our spiritual thirst – and discipline to address it. The temptation to ignore it or mask it is relentless; even when we have drunk deep from the river of God’s grace we can easily turn to other things and forget to refresh our hearts and minds regularly in God’s truth.

Acknowledging and assuaging our own thirst takes humility and courage. But God calls us to recognize the thirst of others as well as our own – to have compassion and mercy towards our fellow travelers, to warn them of the dangers of the river and to share the good news with them. A discipline of evangelism and truth-telling is as vital in our world as deeds of mercy and love.