Drought

To Thirst

shelliwilliams Awareness, Desire for God, Drought, LENT, Need for clean water, Thirst, Water

ThirstyScripture Passage:  Exodus 17: 1-7 (Lent 3A)

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Life in the wilderness is, obviously, precarious.  They have put their trust in God and in Moses and here they are in the middle of the desert, the hot sun beating down upon them.  There is no water anywhere.  It seems to many that God has all but deserted them.  They had done exactly what they were told and now they thought they would surely die in the desert.  And poor Moses.  All he can do is listen to the complaining that is directed right at him.  But what could he do?  He can’t make water.  He can’t command the skies to rain.  He probably wishes that he could just run away.  After all, whose idea was it to make him the leader anyway?  He is surely questioning how he got into this mess.

This is not some sort of metaphorical thirst.  They were thirsty–really, really, parched and dry thirsty; there was no water.  Thirst is perhaps the deepest of human physical needs.  What does it mean to thirst for the things you need the most?  It’s hard for us in the Western part of the globe to even imagine.  (As I write this, I actually got thirsty and went and filled a glass with filtered spring water from Kroger.)  And yet, 780 million people lack access to clean and healthy water.  That’s about 1 in 9 people in the world or about 2 1/2 times the population of the United States.  Lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children at a rate equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every four hours.  And, amazingly, an American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than the average person in a developing country slum uses for an entire day.  Thirst is real.

So did you know that in 2016, the sale of bottled water actually surpassed the sale of other soft drinks.  Well, aren’t we enlightened?  But as we fill our recycle bins with plastic water bottles, what does this mean for us?  For what do we thirst?  Again, don’t think of it as metaphorical.  It is real.  Maybe it’s not physical, but it’s real. For what do you thirst?  For security?  For a life of ease and plenty?  For things to just make a little more sense?  Do you thirst for life as you’ve planned it?  Do you thirst for righteousness?  For justice? For peace?  For meaning?  How many of us simply thirst to be alive, truly alive, in the deepest depth of our being?  Being alive is thirsting for God, thirsting for the one who can walk us through grief and shadows and even death and give us life.  It means that we thirst for the one who thirsts for us.  Thirsting is the thing that makes us real.

Dag Hammarskjold wrote in his journal the words, “I am the vessel, the draught is God’s.  And God is the thirsty one.”  God is thirsty.  God’s love for each of us is so deep, so intense, so desiring our response that it can only be characterized as a thirst. God, parched and dry, thirsts for our thirst.  So, is the Lord among us or not?  God knows everything about you.  The very hairs of your head are numbered.  Nothing in your life is unimportant to God.  God has always been with you, always loved you, and always yearned for you to come into the awareness of God’s Presence in your life for which we strive, that sense of needing something more in the deepest part of you, so much that it leaves you parched without it.  And, ironically, it means letting go of the need to quench your thirst.  Because it is thirst for God that this journey is about.  Ironically, we are not questing to quench it but to live it, to open ourselves to the waters that hold God’s creative Spirit.  To thirst is to be.  To thirst is to know in the deepest part of our being that we need God.  To thirst is to be alive.

I thirst for you.  Yes, that is the only way to even begin to describe my love for you:  I thirst for you.  I thirst to love and be loved by you—that is how precious you are to me.  I thirst for you.  Come to me, and fill your heart and heal your wounds…Open to me, come to me, thirst for me, give me your life—and I will prove to you how important you are to my heart.  Do you find this hard to believe?  Then look at the cross, look at my heart that was pierced for you…Then listen again to the words I spoke there—for they tell you clearly why I endured all this for you:  I thirst.  Come to me with your misery and your sins, with your trouble and needs, and with all your longing to be loved.  I stand at the door of your heart and knock.  Open to me, for I thirst for you. (Mother Teresa of Calcutta)

Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.  I thirst.

On this Lenten journey, I pray that you thirst.  I pray that you experience the deepest and most profound human need that you’ve ever experienced.  I pray that you will know what it means to thirst for God.  Because that is where you will most fully encounter God.  But while we fill our recycling bins with plastic water bottles and quench our thirst with filtered waters from refrigerator doors, I implore you to be a part of projects to bring clean and sustainable water to areas of the world that do not have what we have, to those that truly experience physical thirst.  There are many.  If you feel so inclined, I would encourage you to visit the website for the United Methodist Committee on Relief (Advance # 3020811 is raising funds for the construction of wells to improve drinking water and build toilets in Liberia, Africa.)  Think about it, what if you donated one dime for every glass of water you drank?  Do what you can where you can. 

To donate, click here (and for United Methodists, make sure and enter your church so the church can get credit for the donation.)

 

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

 

To Thirst

shelliwilliams Awareness, Desire for God, Drought, LENT, Need for clean water, Thirst, Water

ThirstyScripture Passage:  Exodus 17: 1-7 (Lent 3A)

From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Life in the wilderness is, obviously, precarious.  They have put their trust in God and in Moses and here they are in the middle of the desert, the hot sun beating down upon them.  There is no water anywhere.  It seems to many that God has all but deserted them.  They had done exactly what they were told and now they thought they would surely die in the desert.  And poor Moses.  All he can do is listen to the complaining that is directed right at him.  But what could he do?  He can’t make water.  He probably wishes that he could just run away.  After all, whose idea was it to make him the leader anyway?

This is not some sort of metaphorical thirst.  They were thirsty; there was no water.  Thirst is perhaps the deepest of human physical needs.  What does it mean to thirst for the things you need the most?  It’s hard for us in the Western part of the globe to even imagine.  (As I write this, I actually got thirsty and went and filled a glass with ice and filtered water out of the refrigerator door.)  And yet, 780 million people lack access to clean and healthy water.  That’s about 1 in 9 people in the world or about 2 1/2 times the population of the United States.  Lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children at a rate equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every four hours.  And, amazingly, an American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than the average person in a developing country slum uses for an entire day.  Thirst is real.

But for those of us who are filling up our recycle bins with plastic water bottles, what does this mean for us?  For what do we thirst?  Again, don’t think of it as metaphorical.  It is real.  Maybe it’s not physical, but it’s real. For what do you thirst?  For security?  For a life of ease and plenty?  For things to just make a little more sense?  Do you thirst for life as you’ve planned it?  Do you thirst for righteousness?  For justice? For peace?  For meaning?  How many of us simply thirst to be alive, truly alive, in the deepest depth of our being?  Being alive is thirsting for God, thirsting for the one who can walk us through grief and shadows and even death and give us life.  It means that we thirst for the one who thirsts for us.  Thirsting is the thing that makes us real.

Dag Hammarskjold wrote in his journal the words, “I am the vessel, the draught is God’s.  And God is the thirsty one.”  God is thirsty.  God’s love for each of us is so deep, so intense, so desiring our response that it can only be characterized as a thirst. God, parched and dry, thirsts for our thirst.  So, is the Lord among us or not?  God knows everything about you.  The very hairs of your head are numbered.  Nothing in your life is unimportant to God.  God has always been with you, always loved you, and always yearned for you to come into the awareness of God’s Presence in your life for which we strive, that sense of needing something more in the deepest part of you, so much that it leaves you parched without it.  And, ironically, it means letting go of the need to quench your thirst.  Because it is thirst for God that this journey is about.  Ironically, we are not questing to quench it but to live it, to open ourselves to the waters that hold God’s creative Spirit.  To thirst is to be.  To thirst is to know in the deepest part of our being that we need God.  To thirst is to be alive.

I thirst for you.  Yes, that is the only way to even begin to describe my love for you:  I thirst for you.  I thirst to love and be loved by you—that is how precious you are to me.  I thirst for you.  Come to me, and fill your heart and heal your wounds…Open to me, come to me, thirst for me, give me your life—and I will prove to you how important you are to my heart.  Do you find this hard to believe?  Then look at the cross, look at my heart that was pierced for you…Then listen again to the words I spoke there—for they tell you clearly why I endured all this for you:  I thirst.  Come to me with your misery and your sins, with your trouble and needs, and with all your longing to be loved.  I stand at the door of your heart and knock.  Open to me, for I thirst for you. (Mother Teresa of Calcutta)

Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.  I thirst.

On this Lenten journey, I pray that you thirst.  I pray that you experience the deepest and most profound human need that you’ve ever experienced.  I pray that you will know what it means to thirst for God.  Because that is where you will most fully encounter God.  But while we fill our recycling bins with plastic water bottles and quench our thirst with filtered waters from refrigerator doors, I implore you to be a part of projects to bring clean and sustainable water to areas of the world that do not have what we have, to those that truly experience physical thirst.  There are many.  If you feel so inclined, I would encourage you to visit the website for the United Methodist Committee on Relief (Advance # 3021026 is improving accessibility to clean water in Ghana.)  Do what you can where you can. 

To donate through UMCOR for this project, click here (For United Methodists, fill your church in so that they get credit!)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

 

Dancing in the Rain

shelliwilliams Darkness, Disruption, Doubt, Drought, Faith, Healing, JESUS, Presence of God, Suffering, Transformation
Image from “Singing in the Rain” (1952)
(with Gene Kelly)

Lectionary Passage:  John 6: 1-21
To read this passage online, go to http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=John+6:1-21&vnum=yes&version=nrsv

We love this story.  (And they must have loved it in the first century because the writers of all four gospels chose to include it their unique account of the Good News of Jesus Christ.) Yes, we like the notion of Jesus providing everything we need, bursting in just when we are at the end of our ropes, just when we need help the most, and fixing the ails of our life (or at least feeding us lunch!).

But notice (don’t you hate that…yes, I’m about to ruin your image of super-hero Jesus pulling lunch out of a hat or whatever we thought he did!) that the story never says that the boy’s lunch was the ONLY food there.  Perhaps there were some people holding back what they had brought, afraid to offer it for community consumption because, after all, what if they ran out?  What if they needed it tomorrow or the next day or after they retire?  So, perhaps the miracle lies not in some sort of image of Jesus creating something from nothing but rather in the little boy himself.  He was first, freely offering what he had to Jesus and the Disciples to do whatever they needed to do with it.  Now, note what was in the little boy’s lunch–barley bread and fish.  Barley is a very inexpensive and somewhat “unglamourous” grain and fish were plentiful.  After all, they were right next to this huge lake.  (Just to get it in your head, the “Sea” of Galilee is actually a huge lake.)  In other words, this was the lunch of the poor.  The little boy was more than likely not from a family of means.  Perhaps his mom had lovingly packed all they had into his lunch so that her son could have this experience of seeing this great man Jesus of whom they had only heard.  But before that ever happened, the little boy stood and offered everything he had.

And, then, well you know how it goes.  The person next to him saw what he had done, thinking that no longer could he now with a clear conscience keep what he had brought tucked away.  And then the person next to that person saw him offer what he had.  It went on and on, a veritable Spirit moving through the crowd.  The message is right.  It WAS a miracle!  And when they had finished eating, they realized that it wasn’t that there was enough for all.  There was more!  There were leftovers that were then gathered into baskets.  Maybe they were for later.  Maybe they were for those who needed it.  Or maybe they were offered as holy doggie bags to remind us that God always gives us way more than we really need. 

So what about those of us who feel that we need to be prepared for the next storm that is coming around the bend?  Well, keep reading.  The passage goes on to say that the disciples started across the lake in the darkness.  And, sure enough, the storm began to rage–blowing winds, crashing waves, beating sheets of rain bearing down upon them.  Wouldn’t you know?  See, this is what we were afraid of!  But, there is Jesus.  “Do not be afraid.  Do not be afraid.”  What is interesting is that the account never says that Jesus calmed the storm.  Jesus calmed the disciples.  Jesus reminded the disciples that no matter what, no matter how hungry or unprepared they are, no matter what storms come up unexpectedly, they are not alone.  It is truly a story of extraordinary abundance.

I was going to write today on the David and Bathsheeba story but I got up early this morning to get a drink of water.  And standing at the window in my kitchen, I saw the words on a plaque I have on the window sill:  “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass.  It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”  (I looked it up and the quote is attributed to Vivian Green.)  It’s a great thought.  Jesus is not a super hero that performs unexplainable miracles or plucks us out of the storms of life.  Jesus is much more.  When the storms come, when the winds rage, and when we just think we just don’t have enough for what’s coming, God invites us to dance, holding us until we find the rhythm that is deep within us and know the steps ourselves.

So, keep dancing!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

For those of you who are reading this through the St. Paul’s ESPACE link, welcome!  And for those who get this as a “blog” email, yes, I’m finally back!  I’m going to try to maybe do this 2-3 times a week.  Keep on me!  🙂  Shelli

Drought

shelliwilliams Drought, LENT, Thirst

It may seem a little strange to talk about drought after all the torrential rains we’ve had this week, but the effects of last summer’s drought are just now starting to come to be.  Estimates are now at $7.6 billion in losses to forestry and livestock.  So, needless to say, last year’s drought is deep and everlasting.

I have to confess that I thought of the notion of “drought” because last night, I could not for the life of me, decide what to write about for today.  I felt like I was in a “drought”.  So, why not go with it?  Lent is often characterized with drought.  We practice giving up and letting go.  Our worship is more reserved, void of celebratory “Alleluia’s” (although if we were REAL Lenten practicioners, we would live in drought during the week and then Sundays would still be celebratory!).  To a certain degree, we who have much have to force ourselves into a 40-day season of drought.  Why?  Because it makes us realize who we are and what we need.  It makes us vulnerable, open, receptive.  It gets us out of ourselves.  (It gets us away from what we WANT to do, what we think we SHOULD do, and listen…)  It shows us what we need.  Besides, maybe a little drought now and then does us good.  After all we are drowning–drowning in work, drowning in our home lives, drowning in our relationships.  We are drowning with too much to do and too much to pay.  We are drowning in an image of someone whom we are not.  And so, God gave us thirst; God gave us drought.  Because when we thirst, we will look for what quenches our thirst.  When our need is the highest, we will reach for something else.

I just had my crepe myrtles in the backyard trimmed.  And once everything was cleared away, I realized that they had done what so many trees had done around us last summer.  Thirsting and unable to quench their need in the deepest part of their being, they took their roots, their very foundation, and began to reach up and out, spreading themselves along the flowerbed.  (And interestingly enough, even joining themselves with other trees, as if they are holding hands through the turmoil.)  Even trees realize when they cannot fend for themselves.  It’s a shame we have such difficulty doing the same.

So, on this twenty-sixth day of Lenten observance, think about what makes you feel like you’re drowning.  And then think about what it is for which you thirst.  And then thirst…

Grace and Peace,

Shelli