Too Loud to Be Right

The last chord finished four minutes ago and she is still standing in the fourth row with her hands at her sides.

Around her the room has gone back to normal with impressive speed. Chairs scraping. Coats coming off the backs of them. Two men behind her deciding, at length and with real feeling, where to eat. A toddler running the length of the aisle with a plastic cup and a grown adult in pursuit, and everybody laughing at both of them. It is a good room. She likes these people. She has known some of them eleven years.

And she cannot make herself move, because something inside her is roaring.

That is the only word she has for it. Not sadness. She has checked, more than once, and nothing is wrong. Her family is well. Her week was ordinary and mostly good. This is not grief wearing a costume and it is not a crisis. It is a wanting, with no object she can name except God, and it has been getting louder for about seven months, and standing in the fourth row on a Sunday morning it is close to unbearable.

She looks around at everybody else with their coats on.

That is the part that has started to frighten her. They seem fine. They seem, honestly, wonderful: settled, warm, unhurried, able to talk about lunch four minutes after singing about the Lord of hosts. And she has begun to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that they were all handed something she was not, or she was handed something faulty. Nobody else appears to be standing in a row at half past twelve wanting God so much they cannot pick up a bag.

She mentioned it once. To a good person, who meant nothing but kindness, and who said something gentle about seasons, and about resting in Him, and about how sometimes we strive too much. And she nodded, and thanked her, and went out to the car feeling exactly like somebody who had finished a large meal and asked for more.

So now she does not mention it. She stands until the room thins out and then she picks up her bag like everybody else and drives home with the radio off.

Maybe you are the one in the row. Maybe it is not a row at all: maybe it is four in the morning, or the long drive, or the ten minutes in the parking lot before you go in. Wherever it happens to you, it is loud, and it has been loud for a while, and somewhere in the last few months you have started to suspect that being this hungry is itself the evidence that you are doing this wrong.

The loudest voice in the room was His

I want to say the true thing first, because you have been handed the gentle version already and it sent you to the car feeling worse.

Nobody is going to ask you to turn it down. Not on this page. And before anything else, hear that the settled people in your row are not faking and they are not shallow; some people carry this quietly for a lifetime and it is real, and God gives what He gives. The question on the table is not whether your volume is better than theirs. It is whether your volume is a fault, and it is not.

Look at what actually happened on the biggest day of the biggest feast in the Jewish year, in a courtyard packed with people, at the exact moment when water was being poured out and everybody was watching.

In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.John 7:37

He stood and cried. He raised His voice. In the most crowded, most public, most decorous moment available to Him, the Son of God stood up in the middle of a ceremony and shouted about thirst, and He did not shout at the thirsty to compose themselves. He shouted an invitation, and the qualification in it is the thirst itself.

You are the person that sentence was shouted for, and the thirst is the qualification and not the disqualification. John 7:37 says Jesus stood and cried out that anyone thirsty should come to Him and drink, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a shout from a crowded courtyard and puts it into a room where the chairs are being stacked.

And notice the volume. If loud wanting for God were a symptom of something gone wrong, the loudest person in that whole courtyard was Him. He is not embarrassed by the roar in you. He started it, and then He raised His own voice above the crowd so that the people carrying it would know where to bring it.

You have a thirst that Jesus Himself stood up and called out to, and it has never once been read in heaven as a sign that you are doing this wrong. It is written that He cried out, if any man thirst, let him come, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient shout land as a personal address in the fourth row.

The hunger is aimed, not cured

Now the second thing, and it is the one nobody says out loud, so I am going to say it plainly and not soften it.

This is not going away. I am not going to promise you a week when you stop wanting God like this, and I would not want to. The psalmist who wrote the most famous line about thirst in all of Scripture did not end his psalm cured of it.

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

Panting. That is a deer at the end of its strength, sides going, in open country, looking for water. It is not a serene image and it was never meant to be one. And the psalm does not resolve into I no longer thirst. It resolves into hope in God, still thirsty, still going toward the brook.

So here is what this page is doing with your hunger, and it is not what the kind advice tried to do. It is not curing it. It is aiming it. A hunger with nowhere to go turns into shame in about six months, and that is what has been happening to you in the parking lot. A hunger with an address is something else entirely: it is the thing that gets you to the water.

You are carrying a hunger that has an address, and the address is a Person who stood up and shouted His own name into it. Psalm 42 says the soul pants after God as a deer after the brooks, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written thirst and points it at Christ rather than at your performance.

I want to say the warm thing too. It is exhausting, being the loud one. It is lonely in a specific way that is hard to explain to people who love you, and the loneliness is not imaginary. But what has been happening in the row is not a malfunction. It is a large capacity, and a large capacity is only ever a problem in a room where nothing is being poured.

You were made with a thirst this size on purpose, and the One who made it that size stood up in a courtyard and told you where the water is. It is written that He cried out for anyone who thirsts to come to Him and drink, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a written invitation into an actual cup in an actual hand.