Thirsty in a Dry and Weary Land
Michelle Ferguson
July 2006

A Matchbox 20 song I listened to as a teenager has a chorus that goes: she says baby / it’s 3 am / I must be lonely / when she says baby / well I can’t help but be scared of it all sometimes / says the rain’s gonna wash away I believe it.1 If this band is good at anything, it is good at expressing the melancholy, if not apathetic, worldview common to the world in which we live. This song in particular gives us a depressing image: a man cannot sleep; he is up during the “watches of the night” (Ps 63:6) afraid of the relationship he is in; he fears both being truly needed by the woman he loves and that she could leave him. The sound of the voice that sings this song exudes uncertainty, restlessness, hunger. I connected with this song (and with this album) because the music reached down into the deepest parts of me and touched the desire residing there that had yet to find the language and voice with which to be articulated. My seminary journey these last three years has given my desire the language of scripture, maturing it by teaching it to step into the biblical story and echo its characters: I have learned to cry out in prophetic anguish; I have prayed with the psalmists in their laments and thanksgivings; I have tried to question like Job; I have confessed and rebuked in the style of Peter. It is 3:51 am and I know I am lonely.

I am lonely for God, for community. I am lonely with the ache of desire throbbing in my heart, my gut, my soul. Indeed I find myself in “a dry and weary land where there is no water.” I am merely weeks out from my masters program and I am desperate to study and dialogue with others who are just as desperate in their endeavor to study. But here I am, where God has called me. The wilderness. The desert. When I sit in the pew on Sunday mornings my mouth fills with sand, adding insult to the injury of my already parched tongue. When I sit on my couch during the week my soul shrinks the way a piece of meat turns to jerky as the slow heat of an oven sucks its moisture away. In a recent phone conversation with a Fuller professor and well-known Christian philosopher, I heard that I am one of the many seminary grads that have experienced as a result of good theological education the eye opening and heart swelling that ruins me. I cannot live satisfied; I am bound to the insatiable yearning for “something better.” I “have looked upon [God] in the sanctuary” of scripture and seen how far we are from the vision Jesus Christ has ultimately revealed. I praise God for what I have seen, but I cry out to him even more because what I have seen has elicited the response Isaiah gave when he saw God: Woe is me; I am unclean among an unclean people. I feel like I have been sent out into the desert, a prophet lamenting how God’s people just don’t get it. It is lonely out here.

Down deep in our souls in the parts where we cannot hide from ourselves, aren’t we all lonely? Aren’t we all aching to live a vision we probably aren’t even aware of yet? Don’t we know there has to be more than this? Can this really be salvation? Can this really be new creation? This? We aren’t allowed to voice these questions: it feels irreverent, faithless, risky. We’re all at least a little depressed, and we’re all a little afraid that we might find “something better.” What if we needed it? What if it needed us? What if it demanded everything of us? Or, what if we caught the vision and it slipped through our fingers? What if it abandoned us? It’s 3 am and we just can’t help but feel scared… because we’re haunted2 by God calling out to us in the “watches of the night.”

The only way I have found of surviving this “dry and weary land” is to trust that God’s vision, however far we are from seeing and living it out, is on its way to being fulfilled. As sure as God spoke creation into existence, God is speaking new creation into being. His steadfast love holds him in covenant with us. He promises that “as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:10-11). His word has gone out into our world:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God… He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth… No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1:1-18)

God’s vision has been made known to us through Jesus, and inasmuch we follow the Messiah who suffered, we become partners in that vision. There is a connection between seeing God and praising God. And seeing God always radically changes us. If we are not changed, our praise may be nothing more than empty words. As Anabaptists we are convicted that salvation means embodied confession — belief seen in the newness of our life. Spoken words that are not rooted in the reality of our lives are meaningless. Our praise of the God we encounter comes from lips attached to bodies that kneel in repentance and walk the road of the crucified Christ.

I thirst for this newness of life. I thirst for communion with others who have completely offered themselves up to this journey. I endure in the hope that Jesus came to gather his people and will come again to redeem us as sons and daughters. I wait for that Day. I wait with hands stretched out asking for clearer vision with which to know God. I wait with my heart on my sleeve, begging for partners on this road of discipleship.