No Meeting and No Help

At eight in the evening, when the worst of the heat comes off the day, he goes out and waters the strip of ground behind the place he is renting.

It is not much of a garden. Four tomato plants tied to canes with strips of an old shirt, a row of beans that came up crooked, a rosemary bush that was there before he was and will be there after. The soil goes pale and cracked by four in the afternoon and drinks like it has never seen water in its life. He does it by hand, with a can, because the hose fitting does not match the faucet and he has not gotten around to it.

There is a radio playing over the fence, in a language he is still learning, and a dog somewhere further down that starts up every night at the same time. The light comes in low and gold along the wall and turns the dust in the air into something worth stopping for. He does stop for it. He is not miserable. That is worth saying plainly, because people assume this kind of story has to be miserable, and it is not.

He came here for work seven months ago. He knew that part would be hard and he was right and he has managed it. What he did not think about, because nobody thinks about it until they are in it, is that there would be nowhere to go on a Sunday within any distance he can manage, and nobody within four hundred miles who knows what he means when he says the word hungry about God.

There was a room he used to sit in, back home. Eleven or twelve people, folding chairs, somebody's terrible coffee, a woman who always prayed too long and whom everybody loved. He did not know, while he was in that room, that he was being fed. He thought he was attending.

He has stopped opening the book in the evenings. Not out of any decision. It just felt, the last several times, like eating standing up in an empty kitchen, and after a while a person stops doing that.

And what he has concluded, without ever putting it in words, is the thing this page is about. He believes the hunger will die out here. Not dramatically. The way the ground goes by four in the afternoon: pale, cracked, quiet. He believes that a thing that is not fed simply stops in the end, and that in a year he will be somebody who used to be hungry for God, and that this is what happens to people in seasons like his, and that there is no help for it.

So he fills the can at the faucet and he carries it out and he waters four tomato plants and a row of crooked beans, every single evening at eight, without fail.

And it does not once occur to him to ask who is watering him.

Read where the satisfying happens

There is a promise in the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, and everything turns on one preposition in it. People quote the verse and slide straight over the word, and the word is the whole gift.

And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.Isaiah 58:11

In drought. Not after it. Not once the season turns and the rain comes back and there is a room with folding chairs again. In it. The satisfying is placed inside the dry season, in the middle of the cracked ground, at four in the afternoon when nothing looks like it is coming.

You are being satisfied inside the season rather than on the far side of it, and there is no waiting room in that verse. Isaiah 58:11 puts the word drought in the same clause as the word satisfy, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line that old and carries it out to a man with a watering can at eight in the evening.

And look at what He says He is doing while it goes on. Guide thee continually. Make fat thy bones, which is an old and unembarrassed way of saying well fed, thriving, filled out. That is not survival vocabulary. Nobody uses the phrase fat bones about a person who is barely hanging on until conditions improve.

You have a supply running in a season that has nobody in it, and it was never routed through the room you are missing. The written word says the Lord guides continually, which is a word about uninterrupted, and the same Spirit who moved a prophet to choose it is at work in a rented place four hundred miles from anybody who knows what you mean.

He puts the water where the drought cannot reach it

Now hold the two pictures in that verse side by side, because Isaiah gives you both in one breath and they are doing different jobs.

A watered garden. That is supply from outside: somebody comes with a can at eight in the evening, and the ground gets what the ground cannot make. That is real, and it is how a great deal of God's feeding arrives, and it usually arrives through people.

And then, in the same sentence: a spring of water, whose waters fail not. That is not from outside at all. A spring rises. It comes up through the ground from a source deeper than the weather, and it is the one kind of water a drought cannot get at, because a drought works on the surface and a spring does not live there.

You are both of those things at once, and the second one does not depend on the weather above it. Isaiah 58:11 names the garden and the spring in a single breath, and the Holy Spirit is the One who is the water in the second image, rising in a person in a season where nothing is being poured in from the side.

I want to be careful with you here, because there is a lie standing close to this and I do not want it to slip in behind the truth. Nothing on this page says you do not need people. You do. That room with the terrible coffee and the woman who prayed too long was real food, and losing it is a real loss, and I am not going to help you reframe a loss as a lesson. If a way opens back to a room full of people, take it with both hands.

What I am saying is that your hunger is not going to starve out while you wait, because it was never being kept alive by attendance.

And here is the thing about the hunger itself, and this page will not pretend otherwise. It does not get cured tonight. The ache for God is not a wound that closes. It gets aimed. It stops wandering the house looking for something to settle on, and it goes somewhere, at a Person, and being aimed is not the same as being finished. You are hungry for the right thing, and the hunger is being pointed rather than switched off. Isaiah 58:11 promises a spring whose waters fail not, which is a description of something that keeps running rather than something that stops, and the Spirit who put that image in the written word is not trying to make you want Him less.