holy water
Every day from the bathroom upstairs where Riley showers, the music pours, pooling on the floor and sliding under the door and seeping through the ceiling until the whole house floods with worship.
God, I’m on my knees again/God, I’m begging please again/I need you/Oh, I need you
It might as well be that we can hear Riley’s prayers, can feel them moving our bodies, animating our fingers and feet with the force of faith. Streams of living water, that’s what Jesus promised, quenching soul-thirst forever, and while she’s in there seeking her cleansing, it feels as though we get to gulp down a river of grace.
Her washing—that music soul-showering, becomes a washing for us, too, and I feel like a blind one sliding down into the river Sent with God’s salve, made of mortal things like dirt and spit, slathered over my broken eyes. It’s a fact: mix God with any fundamentally human thing and a holy healing happens every time. Pour God through the speaker in the bathroom and Riley’s shower becomes a kind of baptism for a whole household.
How is it, really, that our dried-up disconnection, all this wasteland wandering, ever finds a refreshing reconnecting to God?
It can feel like such a thirsty life, this, and I can be a preoccupied kind of parched, so distracted by the desert I miss God’s new thing springing up. I can believe I’ve been sent out more like Hagar, into the wilderness, me with my full-grown kids, sent out into the wasteland and far from the promise of rain. I can be so self-identifying with my own thirst I’m flat out blind to the well sitting right in front of me until God heals my eyes.
Things happen, life and loss happen, and we feel a kind of deep thirst that hurts so hard we wonder, looking at nothing but desert for miles, how we could ever feel quenched again.
So here I am today, right from the very beginning feeling the dusty bottom of my own resources, Kevin and me chuckling because our watches both read our bodily biometrics and label our readiness low, and isn’t it funny how the honest truth about the limitations of mortality can be so literally labeled. We can feel downright famished, like we’re looking at the end of our flour and oil, even though we serve a God who offers us everything in limitless supply. We can be people of promise forgetting our faith because well, like I said, everywhere we look we only see desert.
And then the water gushes forth, just like God promised.
He says, in fact, that it will one day be that way, the holy water gushing right into every kind of desert.
Just now, the river sounds to us like worship, rolling out from under the bathroom door, rushing out to restore and refresh us.
Walking down these desert roads/Water for my thirsty soul/I need you/Oh, I need you
Riley in there under water worshipping, and I’m thinking it’s a wild wonder of grace to know that God himself is both the well and the water that spills over and flows right down, always down, to the weary waiting wilderness where we sit wondering how we could possibly manage all the cant’s we can’t quite count. The world can feel so old-bone dry, like a whole lot more can’t than can, especially when we measure according to the standard, or anyway, the human hermeneutic.
Maybe you’re feeling a little desert parched, too? Maybe you’re wondering how in the world dry bones could ever live.
Riley, certainly, has in the dusty, beatdown heat of her exceptional lifetime received quite a lot of cant’s and lacks, along with all manner of desert detritus. These things used to stack up like stones in her IEP paperwork, written and counted and measured, even now seem to land in her lap, but she has held them beneath the pour of prayer and praise like pebbles in her fingers carried off by streams of living water. Still, you could wonder how a person like her could ever be so splashing-over full of faith.
This morning, Kevin and I went out on an early run and struck up a conversation about how much we humans think we know about absolutely everything even though it’s clear we really don’t know much at all, how we try to standardize life and faith into a series of statistics and flashy formulas, how we’ve gotten so we don’t mind spouting off about our own opinions, and that’s us, judging the land a wasteland, a dry and barren place, even though God has shown us the well, even though, as far as we’re concerned, He’s scribbled right through all the silly human standards for assessing.
Truth is, it just doesn’t matter how wild and barren this place looks or how parched we feel.
For example, our special people, with their substandard comprehension of language and their less-than-ideal levels of intuitive intelligence and their lack of social awareness, don’t even really measure up to the structural specifics of most spiritual growth plans much less any kind of measure of secular success, but Kevin and I can clearly see that what a dear friend of ours used to say to us is true, that because of grace and not because of us they’re closer to the Kingdom than we are. God’s hesed, His attachment love, just naturally has no need of a standard strategy to shelter a spectacularly singular soul, and it doesn’t matter if you’re walking through a desert when He is the shelter and the well and the water and the daily bread that will quench your thirst and satisfy your hunger. Doesn’t matter who you are or how limited, when He’s the one who’s keeping you.
It’s a baffling dry thing, see, the facts that could keep people away from Him, but we’ve seen firsthand that there is no thirsty throat He can’t touch with a quenching of Himself. It just doesn’t matter much how hard humans happen to think such things will or can or should be. We know: nothing is too hard for Him.
On paper, Riley really shouldn’t be this kind of worshipper.
Your forgiveness is like sweet, sweet honey on my lips,/Like the sound of a symphony to my ears,/Like holy water on my skin, hey!
But every day, it’s like she washes in worship. I can hear her in there now, gulping down the same living water that carries off all the dust and dirt from her body, and it’s like she just knows, like she’s always known, better than maybe I ever have, that the only quenching answer to the thirst of this dry and weary land is the outpouring of holy water that becomes an indwelling swell of God.
