Devotions

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Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; you who have no money, come buy, and eat! Come buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourself in rich food.   (Isaiah 55:1-2)

Although our hunger and thirst are for God, we are always trying to satisfy them with other things. We hunger for satisfaction, for real fulfillment. Not finding it, we stuff ourselves with food, and stuff our houses with gadgets and furnishings. We thirst for intimacy, to offer ourselves to someone who will receive us, who will know us to our depths and delight in us. When this proves impossible, we turn to sex and pornography in the unconscious hope that they will meet the real need that we hardly even know how to acknowledge as yet. We long to be taken out of ourselves, to find a realm beyond our limitations, a realm of freedom, wholeness, and joy. Not encountering this, encountering instead a world full of pain and frustration, we open a bottle or swallow a pill, and find only a frail, temporary freedom.

The longing to be real, to be loved, to be free is so strong and authentic, so impossible to satisfy with the objects of our more everyday and superficial desires, that we are driven to seek its fulfillment beyond the everyday. If we don't know where to seek that fulfillment, or if we find the demands of the quest too alarming, we tend to fall back on our little pleasures and diversions, trying to plug the desperate void with them. Indeed, our consumer society energetically organizes these means of avoiding the quest for God, offering us a false quest that is sustained with enormous force and skill by the engines of economy, media, government, and yes, sometimes by the church and other religious organizations. It requires an equal force and determination to uphold the gospel's counterclaim that we will find ourselves only be emptying ourselves, that our real thirst is for the one thing that no economy or culture can produce. This thirst is for God.