Adventures In Faith: {Satisfied}

A whisper in my ear. Another lie. 

Failure.  I know. I am still failing. At everything.

I can't do this anymore. I'm so tired.  It all feels likes so much work.

My bible lays next my couch, beckoning, promising to fill my empty heart with the things it needs.  I turn away and turn a mindless show on the television.

My bible calls out again. You need me. I get up and do the dishes, pushing away the tears that are threatening to spring up again.

Jesus calls. Come to me. I play with my daughter and put her to bed.

Jesus, help me. I cry in the shower. The tears mingling with the water flowing.

My bible is still there. Next to the couch.

I hear Andy asking questions, What do you want to do tonight?

I can't think. I can't handle this one little innocuous question.

I need to read my bible. I say it in my head before it makes it to my lips, but it does.

I grab my bible and drink, deeply.  I feel like I'm quenching a deep gnawing thirst. Each moment more in the Word and the thirst stops aching so deeply. Every word and I feel my emotions gentle, my heart beat more calmly, my tears draw back.

I didn't know I needed it so much. I used to go months without reading the bible. And now? Now three days and I feel myself drying out inside.

“My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me,

    the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,    broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

Jeremiah 2:13

Digging their own cisterns.  The metaphor rings deep in my soul and I think of how I have been trying to hold water in my own leaking pool, which has been dug in the dirt of my effort, and finding over and over again that the water there doesn't satisfy and is full of disease and sickness.  Finding myself over and over again hunched in pain as my water makes me ill and poisons me from the inside out. 

"For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’ ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

Revelation 7:16

And here I find that His word is true and that as I drink from His spring of pure, clean, living water, my tears begin to dry in my eyes.  Even as I am still reading His word, he takes me and satisfies the deep emptiness inside that He was always meant to fill. 

Jesus is enough for me, filling every crack in my heart. Flooding in and washing the broken pieces out while bringing his soul-quenching peace. A soul delighted in God will want for nothing other than God. It knows at the heart of life is Him and, once found, nothing but Him can quench the thirst that He is meant to sate.

Satisfied. I am satisfied. 

“Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives.”  Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are