God, We're Thirsty

The worst times can inspire the most passionate songs:

O God, you are my God,
Earnestly I seek you;
My soul thirsts for you,
My body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Psalm 63:1

King David was fleeing for his life. His son Absalom had staged a revolt, overthrown the crown and was consolidating his power in Jerusalem. David fled the city with a small band of supporters and headed east across the 20 km stretch of hills towards the Jordan.

David knew these hills well. He had grazed sheep here in his youth; this was the badlands where crazy King Saul had hunted David as a young man. David knew the steep canyons, the hidden caves and bone-dry creek-beds. It was a dangerous land – where the sun beat down and thirst stalked you relentlessly among all your other fears.

The wilderness around him mirrored the landscape of David’s soul. He was dry and bone-weary, exhausted emotionally and physically, desperate.

But the anxiety in his soul is not just a shortage of water, not just longing for personal safety and survival, but a deep-soul thirst for God. He needs God’s help, yes, but even more, he longs for God as a friend, he aches for the nearness of God as a lover longs to be in touch with the beloved. His deepest craving is to know God.

David’s words about thirst express the universal human longing for God. Our thirst for knowledge, for pleasure, for justice, for belonging – these are echoes of the deepest thirst of the human heart – to see the face of God and to know God’s touch.

I had a friend, Keith Price, who shared David’s hunger for God. His book Thirsting After God expressed his life-long ambition to know God better, to seek him earnestly every day of his life. Even with cancer wracking his body, he craved nothing more passionately than companionship with God.

Keith died ten years ago this week – Jan 28, 2001 in Victoria, BC. At his funeral they said of him, “He thirsted after God and when he found Him, he drank from that bottomless ocean and never stopped craving for more.”