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using. But the truth is, I can’t sip from an hour-long church service on Sunday morning or dash off a hasty prayer or gulp down a daily Bible verse and expect them to sustain me any more than I can expect a glass of water to last for a week.
    Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6). Livingin a country like the United States, with an ample water supply, we miss the impact of His example. “Hunger and thirst” imply a desperation I’ve rarely experienced—until hiking here in the wilderness, that is. Back home, I fail to see the vastness of my need for righteousness, stretching in all directions like this desert. Nor do I always recognize the futility of trying to quench my thirst from our culture’s reservoirs. Like the Dead Sea, they promise giddy pleasure and tranquility but the truth is, their waters will poison me if I drink from them. “My people have committed two sins,” God told His people in Jeremiah’s day. “They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns . . . that cannot hold water” (Jeremiah 2:13).
    I don’t need the world’s cisterns. Just as God provided water in the wilderness to quench His people’s thirst, He will quench my spiritual dehydration if I pay attention to my symptoms and recognize my need. Jesus said, “He who believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). Like the birds on Masada who have learned where the faucet is, I can go to the true Source.
    Ah, but that would require spending time with God—more than an hour or two on Sunday, I suspect—getting to know Him, communing with Him, praising Him. And time, not water, is one of our culture’s most precious commodities. And so I dash around in my busy life, giving God stingy drops of my time, checking Him off my to-do list, failing to pause and drink fully and deeply from my relationship with Him in prayer. No wonder my soul feels parched and dry.
    In a land of plentiful water, I think we also forget the preciousness of the well of salvation, the high cost that Jesus paid to cleanse us from sin and clothe us in righteousness.Would we squander His grace if we did, living unrighteous lives, allowing a shallow “sorry” to replace true repentance? It’s no accident that one of the Old Testament’s requirements for renewed purity for sinners was to wash their clothes and immerse themselves in a ritual bath, spending a resource as precious to them as gold—water. And Jesus ordained that our own symbolic cleansing should be through baptism in water. The good news is that His grace doesn’t drip in tiny drops like this faucet on Masada but overflows to all who acknowledge their thirst.
    The birds come and go as I watch them take turns at the stingy waterspout. I have to resist the urge to open the spigot and create a lavish puddle of water where they can splash and drink freely. I don’t do that, of course. But I know a lot of people back home—more precious to God than sparrows—who are dying of thirst and need the water of life. I can lead them to the Source so they will never thirst again.
    Stones and Sheep
    Today we’re hiking up a narrow, rocky path in the area where Christ’s temptation took place. Like all of the other wilderness places I’ve seen, the acres and acres of featureless desert have no fences or boundaries or landmarks. The terrain seems inhospitable to any form of life. Yet when I stop to take a drink of water and eat a granola bar, I see movement on a nearby hill, as if the rocks have sprung to life and are milling around. Am I hallucinating from the searing sun?
    The migrating rocks turn out to be a flock of shaggy sheep with wool the same dirty beige color as the desert. I watch as the shepherd leads them closer and closer to where I’msitting, and I’m surprised to see that he is a young boy, ten or twelve years old. How will this child ever find his way home again? Doesn’t his