Sunday Morning Meds--Thirsting and Panting

“As the deer pants for streams of water, 

so my soul pants for you, O God.” Psalm 42 

I used to bale hay. Just about every memory haying is in the barn, where, by noon, temperatures would soar in dusty, cob-webbed corners of ancient hay mows.

Today, years later, I start buying lemonade come June. Often, I chug it, even though I haven’t bucked a bale in half a century. I remember baling hay whenever I drink lemonade. I remember slipping wet quart jars out of insulated paper bags, screeching off lids, and chugging cold lemonade right through a dozen ice cubes.

Still, I’m guessing only a few of us know the extremity of the simile—a level of thirst that rages into full-throated panting. I’m certainly not among them. I’ll never forget chugging ice cold lemonade in a hay mow, but I was nowhere near dying, even though at twelve I may have thought so and probably acted like it.

We don’t know that David wrote Psalm 42, but some believe he did; what’s more, some think he wrote it when his son Absalom was threatening his father’s life. Whether or not that’s true, the heft of the psalm’s opening simile has little to do with hot days in the hay mow.

What David is saying—if indeed he is the author—is that he passionately thirsts after God because God seems nowhere to be found. That’s a different kind of thirst at issue.

On a particularly dark day for us, we took a walk around town. When we passed some houses of people we knew, I couldn’t help but recount the troubles each of those families were going through too. Maybe it was my own problems that made me calculate tribulations—I don’t know. But I did, sadly. I racked up other people’s problems as if to take the edge off mine perhaps.

I’d just read a little from Calvin, specifically a line in Book I of the Institutes: “Without certainty of God’s providence life would be unbearable.”

I’m sure he’s right; certainty is one fine blessing; but I’m not sure every last believer gets the gift of certainty. That night, I was a lot less confident than Calvin.

Psalm 42, long a favorite of many, is all about chugging certainty even in desperation, about knowing for absolute sure that God is there, even when we’re torn apart and sure as heck he’s not. Psalm 42 is the gut-wrenching plea of a man who finds himself without.

That thirst is for nothing with ice cubes, for something a whole lot more substantial than lemonade. The thirst is for living water to refresh the parched soul of someone wandering in a desert where there’s nothing more before him than a horizon of hot sand.

I dare say that lots of folks know that thirst, even David the King, David the poet, David the man closest to God’s own heart. Even he knew what it meant to pant.

It’s always nice to remember we aren’t alone, isn’t it? It seems to me just one blessing of this wonderful line of scripture—and all of Psalm 42--is knowing even David got that thirsty.