It Never Went Quiet

She is forty-four and she has been given the answer eleven or twelve times, by good people, and it has never once worked.

The first one came when she was nineteen and it was: you are in the honeymoon phase, and this settles down. She waited for it to settle down. It did not. It got louder in her twenties, in fact, in a way she stopped mentioning to anybody, because by then the second answer had arrived and it was: this is a season, and seasons pass.

The third one was practical, and it was given kindly by a woman she still admires. Get into a rhythm. Read at the same time each day, keep a notebook, join the study on Tuesdays. She did all of it, faithfully, for six years. The notebook has her handwriting getting smaller in it toward the end, which she noticed once and has thought about since.

The fourth answer was the one that stung and she has never repeated it to anyone. It came sideways in a conversation about something else, and it was: some people are just more emotional about God, and that is fine, as long as you do not make everybody else feel like they are doing it wrong. She said, no, of course, and laughed, and went home and sat in the car outside her own house for a while.

After that she stopped asking.

So she built the life, and it is a good life, and none of what follows is a complaint about it. She married a patient man. She raised two people who turned out well. She has led things and taught things and been genuinely useful, and she prays in the mornings and means it, and she is not one of those people who is quietly bitter and calls it discernment.

And underneath the whole of it, for twenty-five years, there has been this.

It is not a crisis. It is not depression; she checked, properly, with somebody qualified, because she is not stupid. It has no dramatic symptoms at all. It is a low, constant, physical wanting, in the chest and slightly lower, for God, and only for God, and nothing that has ever been offered to it has touched the sides. Not the notebook. Not the good marriage. Not the years of usefulness. Not the Tuesdays. Not the moments, and there have been real ones, when He came near enough that she wept in a parking lot with the engine off.

Those were the worst, in a way. Because after each of them it came back within a week, bigger.

This morning she is out early, before anybody in the house is up, standing in wet grass at the edge of a stream she has known since she was a child. The mist is still lying in the field. The water is running over brown stones and making the noise it has always made, and she is standing there with her hands in her jacket pockets, forty-four years old, thinking a sentence she has not let herself finish for a very long time.

What if it was never going to go quiet. And what if that is not the bad news.

The Deer Is Not Malfunctioning

I want to start with the diagnosis you have been carrying, because it is wrong, and it has cost you more than any of the answers did.

Somewhere in the last twenty-five years you concluded that a hunger which will not resolve is a defect in the person carrying it. Not in so many words. It got in sideways, the way that kind of thing does, through a tone of voice and a look and an answer that assumed you would be finished by now.

So let me put a psalm in front of you and let you notice who wrote it and where it is kept.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?Psalm 42:1-2

That is a temple musician. A professional. Somebody whose actual daily work was leading a nation in worship, writing down, in the songbook everybody would sing from, that his soul is panting like an animal that has run out of water.

You are standing in the middle of the oldest and healthiest tradition there is, and you were never the first person in Scripture to be this thirsty. Psalm 42 is written proof, kept on purpose in the book, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes sure a psalm about panting is never read as a psalm about a fault.

Now look at the animal, because the picture is doing precise work and people skim it. A deer that pants for water is not a broken deer. It is a healthy deer accurately reporting its condition. The panting is the correct response of a working body to a real need, and a deer that had stopped panting would not be a more mature deer. It would be a dying one.

You have a working soul, and the wanting that has embarrassed you for twenty-five years is the sound of it functioning exactly as designed. That is what the written word says with its choice of animal, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a thirsty deer and lays it against the ribs of a woman standing in wet grass.

He Aims It. He Does Not Cure It.

Now here is the thing that changes how the rest of your life feels, and I want to be careful and honest with it, because a lot of people will tell you the opposite and mean well.

The hunger for God is not a problem He is slowly solving in you. It is not a symptom of an early stage that later stages resolve. Look at how that psalm ends, because it does not end tidy. It ends with the man still talking to his own soul, still saying hope thou in God, still waiting. The Bible keeps that. It could have kept only the songs that resolve. It kept this one, unfinished, with the question still standing in it.

And look at the people in Scripture who got the most of God. They are not the ones who wanted Him least by the end. Moses had seen more than anybody alive and what he asked for was to see God's glory. Paul had been caught up into the third heaven and was still writing about wanting to know Him. The wanting scales with the receiving. That is not a bug in the system, and it is the exact opposite of what your nineteen year old self was told.

You are hungry because you have already been fed, and you were tasting something real every time it came back bigger a week later. Psalm 34:8 says taste and see that the Lord is good, and tasting is precisely the thing that enlarges an appetite rather than closing it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been doing the enlarging on purpose all this time.

So what happens to it, if it is not cured? It gets aimed.

That is the whole difference and it is a physical one. An unaimed hunger wanders around a life looking for something the right size, and finds nothing, and turns into that low restlessness you have been managing since your twenties. An aimed hunger goes to the water. Same hunger. Same size. Completely different life.

You have permission this morning to stop trying to shrink it, and you were never asked to. The written word gives a temple musician an entire psalm of unresolved thirst and calls it worship, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes what you have been apologizing for and points it at the living God.