Okay, first things first. Update on my relationship with God: I’ve been able to put more words to what’s going on. I realized that I would try to fill up spiritually in my time alone with God, but it was just like getting a little 36 ml cup of water when what I need is a whole litre of Him. I pour myself out all day long, every day, and arrive at the end of my day so spiritually exhausted that it manifests physically. I collapse on the floor, empty and wordless. I have been so dehydrated. I just need Living water…desperately.
I remember back in the states experiencing something I liked to call spiritual constipation. This was when I would get so filled up on God, but I wouldn’t have the channel to pour it all out, though it was often overflowing. Here, there’s always someone to pour myself out into, but I often find myself so dry at the end of the day. But you need to know, it is so worth it. I think, if given the choice, I would choose to be spiritually dehydrated over spiritually constipated anyday. It’s weirdly fulfilling. Kind of like when you hike up a mountain in midday heat and you run out of water to drink, but every new venue you arrive at along the mountainside is that much more fulfilling in your utter exhaustion and dehydration. It’s more rewarding in contrast to the struggle you went through to get to each new panorama, then if you got there without the sacrifice and with leftover energy waiting to be spent. And then the views you experience on the climb up the mountain, those are the times that I take a step back from everything long enough to see what God’s seeing, what He’s doing…at times directly in and through me. And it makes it all worth it.
Jimmy, one of our leaders, prophesied over me during our debrief that he had this vision of me drawing water out of a well. It took tremendous effort for me to even get a cup of water out of the well because the well was so deep and the water was so low. And yet I would draw out what I could from the well’s great depth, drink every last drop of the water, and then trek on through the desert. I kept walking forward from well to well, drawing the little water I could from each well I journeyed by. Then his vision, like a camera, panned out on the scene, showing that my trek in the desert was between two oceans. One ocean was that which I had come from; a place where the water was so ample that I not only could drink my fill, but I played and danced in the ocean’s water. And then there was the ocean on the other side. It was a long journey yet, with many more wells to draw from before I arrived, but the oceanside awaited me. And just like arriving at a mountain venue is that much more rewarding when I’m exhausted and dehydrated, I know that the ocean’s water, too, will be so much more refreshing after my trek across the desert, with only half-dry wells to draw from.
