An Unquenchable Soul

On my reckoning with thirst

Four years ago my wife, three sons and I moved from Aotearoa’s largest city Auckland, population 1.8million, to the quiet beachside town of Tairua, population 1600.

And it was like hitting the breaks at 100kms an hour.

For the seven years prior I’d spent my life touring New Zealand, Australasia, Europe and the United States. I surrounded myself with the arts, with culture, with community and a vivid, energetic life. So that even when I began my long journey with chronic illness, and I couldn’t work or do much, I had the benefit of all the stimulation a city brings.

I could sit in a cafe window surrounded by people, watching the world go on. My personal world may have been on hold, but the rest of the world wasn’t and that brought me a strange comfort. Back then, I hadn’t realised just how much all that had propped me up.

Because soon after our move to Tairua I became sick again. Except this time there was no ‘world out there’ to watch. To make me feel like I was a part of something. This time there were no local arts, window-seat cafe’s with quality filter coffee, and no crowds. In Tairua it was dead quiet in winter. Community was sparse. The world was slow, still, and utterly unyielding to my needs for stimulation.

Through that emptiness something made itself known with penetrating intensity, my ache.

I’ve always known I ache to some degree. That there’s something in me that pines for more. That dreams, wants, needs, hopes. What I hadn’t known, was just how potent it truly is. I’d been so distracted by the world around me, with all its hyper-stimulation, that I hadn’t grasped the magnitude, the unchained intensity of it.

But now, in Tairua, and again incredibly sick (a story in my saga of chronic illness for another time), the realisation that I had an utterly unquenchable fire within me became terrifying. I couldn’t satisfy it, I couldn’t push it down or deny it. I was finding myself in a crisis of thirst.

And so, begrudgingly yet with a definite desperation, I began to prayerfully make sense of this drive within me. I began consciously reckoning with human desire.

The circumstances that brought me to this journey may be unique, but I don’t think my thirst is. Because as I wrestled my own longing, living this stripped-back, quiet life, the world around me started to look like a thirst-engine. I began to see with crystal clarity that the defining call of our culture in this moment is to fill this ache with whatever it’s selling.

To give in.

And yet, I doubt I’ve met even one genuinely satisfied person in my whole life. The stats agree with me too, I think, because even with all this giving in, antidepressants are so common they’re traceable in drinking water the world over.

In her book Dopamine Nation, Leading neuroscientist Anna Lembke explains to us that our bodies aren’t built to deal with this avalanche of pleasure and dopamine inducing products our world offers. So much so that getting what we want is actually having the opposite effect. “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake” she tells us, “leads to anhedonia, which is an inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”

It turns out that our trying to satisfy this ache with the things of this world is literally making us sick.

I can relate, because in my own wrestle with boredom, disappointment and the ache of desire I oscillated between fixing it with more stimulation and pushing it down so I didn’t have to face it at all.

But that’s not the gospel, that’s not the way of vitality.

Whether it’s for my own journey of chronic illness in quiet small town life, or yours with singleness, lust, disappointment, divorce, sickness, addiction or whatever, we all need a gospel. We need another Way.

And there is one. Because buried beneath the transactional, moralistic, reductive gospel we’re so used to preaching is an ancient invitation to bring our ache into the one who created it. To catch our desire up into Desire himself. To allow our longing to be the holy homing beacon is it was created to be.

Thirsting is my invitation to that third way. The way of engulfing desire and homing it where it belongs. It’s an invitation to reject the sirens call of this world to just ‘give in’ and to instead come alive with the white-hot, energising love of God.

It’s an invitation to drink deeply of Love. To desire as prayer. To a vital life lived in the Trinity who created it.

Don’t live dehydrated. Don’t buy the lie that the candy water this world has to offer can meet the soul-deep hydration you need. It will only make you more numb and more dehydrated than before.

Come to the Well.
Open up to Love.
Bring your thirst, Home.

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My new book Thirsting: Quenching Our Soul’s Deepest Desire comes out October 1st but you can pre-order it today from: New Zealand / Australia and United States. If you pre-order before October 1st you’ll also get free access to my online prayer course BEHOLD. Have a read of how early readers have experienced Thirsting here.