Who will satisfy your thirst?

Besides a continued need for food and drink, for shelter and liberty, we have many more wishes and desires, sometimes even conflicting ones. We yearn for truth, freedom, justice, love, affection and appreciation, which require more perfect fulfillment time and time again. If you have been following the events in Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Bahrain, Iraq and Iran and many other countries demanding that their leaders step down you know the desires of many. Some times I am not sure many people even know what exactly they want. Yet, there is another kind of inner yearning of the human heart that is difficult to explain. In spite of all the efforts employed to quench this inner thirst, we still long for more. What is this inner emptiness that we all experience? Old Testament writers speak of it as a thirst for God. The Psalmist says, “As a deer longs for a stream of cool water, so I… thirst for you, the living God”, (Ps. 42). Isaiah calls us to, “come, everyone who is thirsty…come to me, (55:1-3). For Jeremiah God is a spring of fresh water”, (7:13). In Matthew’s Gospel Christ invites us to, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest”, (12:28). The thirst we all feel is a thirst for God. It is the same inner thirst that people have experienced since the beginning of time. St. Augustine stated it clearly when he noted that “Our hearts are made for God, and they will not rest, until they rest in God”. Our hearts, indeed, have a God-shaped hole in them, that only God can fill.

Frank Sheed was on target when he observed that the human heart has a spiritual thirst, but instead of helping people satisfy this spiritual thirst, in a spiritual way, we give them material things. In John’s Gospel chapter 4 Christ offers to satisfy the yearning of a Samaritan woman’s heart. He says to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to your, ‘Give me a drink’, you would have asked him and he would have given you the living water”. Jesus is right here in our midst, living among us and is eager to assist us in our needs. But we always keep him aloof, at the edge of our lives. We really keep him away from us and outside of where we live, outside our life. We keep him at a distance. To our everyday living, we see him as a stranger. The things that make our day we think Christ is not interested in them. The thirst in our hearts, we believe Christ does not know. And all the time, our hearts go thirsty. They thirst for peace and love, for security and safety, for health and happiness. But instead of looking for Christ, we go digging our shallow holes to get water. We come here, and we go there, we turn somewhere else, trying to find something to satisfy our thirst. We try money, drink, power, love, sex, drugs and alcohol. We are like the people Jeremiah speaks of when he says, “My people have abandoned me, the fountain of living water, only to dig cisterns for themselves, leaky cisterns that hold no water’ (2:3)

So the question is who will satisfy the desire of your heart? Is it something or somebody? Or God? If you have tired everything and everyone and they fail you, why not try God?