I Thirst

At the dinner table the other night, a friend told us about his years as a transient wanderer.

He had come to know the Lord, but his alcoholism drove him to the streets again and again.

“One time,” he said, “I left treatment and went out on the street. I walked a long way, and I came to a restaurant. I knew they would give me some ice water, so I went in. While I was sitting at the counter, a well-dressed man came in. After looking around for a moment, he came and sat by me.”

“‘Are you a believer in Jesus?’ the man asked me. So I told him I was. We talked a while. He invited me to come and stay in his home. It had rich carpets and nice beds. I stayed in one part of the house, and he stayed in the other. He told me that when he had chosen to believe in Jesus, his wife had left him, taking his son with her. He was alone, but he wanted to use what he had to honor the Lord. I lived there many months, but then, I walked out one day because I had gotten thirsty again.”

Our friend had forgotten that the Living Water of Christ had enabled him to never be thirsty again, and even the kindness of the stranger was not enough to remind him. He thirsted for what had only brought him loneliness, destruction, and death.

His thirst drove him from street to street, but he also thirsted for righteousness.

In his drunkenness, he became angry at God and wandered until he found a Christian bookstore. 

He entered and started railing at the clerks there. “How come God lets me be a drunk?” he demanded to know. He hit one of the clerks. The police came, arrested him, and he sobered up in jail.

There, he prayed. “God, show me that you are who you say you are. Save me from my thirst.”

The clerk of the Christian bookstore dropped the charges against our friend. A spot opened up at a Christian alcohol rehab in a city where he had connections. He joined a church that discipled him. 

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied,” he quotes from memory now, and he says that his switch from a thirst for death to a thirst for life took many years. “I’m still a work in progress,” he says.

When Jesus hung on the cross, His thirst fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies about Him. “I thirst,” He said, proving the prophecies in the Psalms true, but also proving to our friend and to us that Jesus knows what it is to be thirsty.

His invitation still rings true for all of us: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.”

After our friend left, my daughter was playing Isaiah 55 on the piano: “Come everyone who thirsts! Come to the waters! And he who has no money, come! Buy and eat!”