My Soul Is Thirsty And I Called It Something Else

She has been trying to fix it since about February and it is now well past summer.

She started with sleep, because that is where everybody starts. Then she looked at her phone and cut it down and felt better for nine days. Then it was a vitamin, and then a different vitamin. Then she wondered whether it was the job, and thought about that seriously for a while, and concluded that it is not the job, because she likes the job.

Then she read a book about burnout and did not recognize herself in it. Then she read a book about the middle of life and recognized herself slightly too much and put it in a drawer.

And underneath all of it, the same thing, every day, since February. A kind of leaning. A feeling of being turned toward something that is not in the room. Not sadness. She wants to be clear about that, and she has had to be clear about it with two different people who assumed. It is not sadness. Nothing is wrong.

She has a phrase for it that she has never said out loud. Something is missing and I have no idea what it is. She has been treating that sentence as a symptom for seven months.

If you have got a sentence like that and a list of things you have tried on it, come and sit down. Nothing on the list was stupid, and nobody here is going to hand you an eighth thing to try.

Somebody wrote this down three thousand years ago and gave it a name

There is a psalm that opens with a deer at the end of its strength looking for water, and then the man writing it turns the picture on himself, and he does not treat what he finds as a defect.

My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?Psalm 42:2

Thirst. Not illness, not failure, not a character problem, not a season to push through. Thirst.

And look at what thirst is. It is not the absence of something you might like. It is the built-in signal of a real need in a body that is designed to have that need met. Nobody has ever fixed thirst by improving their attitude toward it. Nobody has ever fixed it by sleeping more, and nobody has ever cured it with a vitamin. It is not a malfunction. It is the equipment working exactly as designed and pointing at water.

Which means that for seven months she has been running diagnostics on a signal, and the signal was never broken.

You are thirsty, and thirsty is not the same word as broken. Psalm 42:2 puts it plainly, in the mouth of a man who was not ashamed to say it about himself, and the same Spirit who moved on him as he wrote it is the one who takes the fixing project out of a woman's hands.

It has a direction, and that is the part that changes the week

Here is what the psalm gives her that none of the seven months gave her, and it is not comfort. It is a direction.

My soul thirsteth for God. Not for rest. Not for clarity. Not for a better arrangement of a life that is already fine. For God, and then he says it again, for the living God, as though the first time was not specific enough for what he meant.

That is why nothing on the list worked. Every item on the list was an attempt to make the leaning stop. None of them was an attempt to follow it.

And notice the last line of the verse: when shall I come and appear before God. He is not asking to feel better. He is asking to arrive somewhere. There is a whole different posture in that, and it is available to a woman who has spent seven months trying to make herself stop leaning.

You have been leaning toward something real, and you were not imagining it for a single one of those months. He promised it, in the invitation to everyone who thirsts to come to the waters (Isaiah 55:1), and His Spirit does not put a longing into a person and then leave them holding it alone.

The part that outranks all of the teaching

Before we go one line further, this outranks everything above.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will never be one here.

And if the restlessness has any weight of real depression in it, that is a matter for a doctor and not for a page, and going to one is not a spiritual failure of any kind. It is the wise and grown-up thing and it is what I would want for my own sister.

You are not further from God because of anything your body needs, and you never have been. That is 2 Corinthians 8:12, not my reassurance, and His Spirit has never once been issued according to what somebody is medically allowed to do.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.