Not Working Up a Thirst

Rumor has it that summer is officially over and autumn has arrived. You couldn’t prove it today by the thermometer, but the weatherman is predicting temperatures in the 70’s this weekend. Even so, we won’t soon forget summer’s heat.

I’m not a green-thumb person, but for Mother’s Day I bought my wife some purple flowers to put around the mailbox. The label said they’re “vincas.” (Not to be confused with ancient native Peruvians with a similar name.) I even planted them in special, high-potency soil. The flowers did grow rapidly and adorned the front yard.

Then summer came, with high temperatures and little rain. Safeguarding my botanical investment, I went out at least every other day to water the flowers. Every time I pulled into our driveway, I felt sorry for the little fellers, panting and chlorophyll-tinted tongues hanging out due to thirst. I had to give them a drink once in awhile.

Our little green friends’ plight reminded me of a couple of passages in the Bible. In the Beatitudes, Jesus stated, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:6). In the Psalms, King David had written about himself in similar terms: “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you, my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1).

Do I really thirst for God, for His righteousness? Maybe that’s the problem with Christian America. We’ve become absorbed into the culture, opting for a convenient, comfortable God – not one that has us desperately thirsting for Him, as one thirsts after mowing a lawn on a hot summer day.

As Patrick Morley wrote in his book, The Man in the Mirror, we have settled for the God we want, not the God who is. Maybe once we work up a thirst for God, as described in the Scriptures, we can again serve as salt and light in this “dry and weary land where there is no water.”

A Visit to ‘The Shack’

For a Robert, I’m really a Johnny-come-lately: usually trailing the curve in technology advances like computers, camera and cell phones. Sometimes I also lag behind in reading books many people are talking about.

That was my situation in reading The Shack by William P. Young. For more than a year I have been hearing about this book, alternately described as “awesome,” “theologically spurious,” “compelling,” even “heretical.” Finally I decided to “Shack-up” (in a way of speaking) and see for myself.

I found it thought-provoking, imaginative, inspiring, even worth reading again. Some of Young’s theology can be debated, but I don’t think he’s making dogmatic statements on biblical interpretation. If anything, he asks readers to relax religious paradigms, suspend their disbelief (as with any work that involves fantasy), and allow themselves to take a fresh look at God and their preconceptions about Him (or, ahem, Her).

Initially, after discovering the story centers around a little girl abducted by a serial killer, I hesitated. Not exactly light summer reading. But I proceeded and found the author – who has experienced great tragedy of his own – seeking to address with honesty and compassion the paradox of a good God that oversees a world of evil, pain and suffering.

Young is audacious enough to put words into God’s mouth and takes certain liberties that those who recoil at even the suggestion of extra-biblical revelation will find troubling. But considering the Word of God was written for finite minds struggling in vain to understand the infinite and divine, I suspect Young’s exercise of literary license doesn’t unsettle the Lord all that much.

In Isaiah 55:8 God declares, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” In The Shack, Young strives to explore those words through narrative. I’m grateful that he does.