I Thirst
Most of you know that I am an RN so when I saw “I Thirst” I thought, “well of course he was thirsty, he was dehydrated” Those of you who know me probably know what I would have sounded like if I said it out loud. I mean Duh! Jesus had been hanging on the cross for about 3 hours after being interrogated, beaten, and carrying a heavy chunk of wood up a hill. I start going through the signs and symptoms of dehydration and the effect that dehydration has on the body. I don’t stop there though....I started to wonder if I could have put an IV in him. I mean I was good at it. I used to brag that could get an IV in a stone. I once inserted a small IV in the thumb of an elderly person with “no veins left”. So the idea of talking about “I thirst” seemed pointless at first. I wasn’t going to chose it but I was drawn to it. You could say it spoke to me.I’ve been an RN for 34 years but I started working in a hospital when I was only 19..... Still a child really. Nursing seemed like a sensible carrer choice but was never my first choice. For the first 22 years of my career I worked in Intensive Care/Coronary care and Pediatric ICU.
Many years ago, before Hospice really started in this country, we kept people alive on Ventilators for much longer than we should have. We put people on life support who were not going to survive, prolonging their suffering and separating them from their families. We pumped them full of drugs, put tubes in arteries to measure the pressures, took away their ability to talk by putting a tube in their nose or mouth and almost every other orifice. We took away their humanity and their dignity
Visiting hours were limited so they were often alone only nurses and other staff who may have been working 16 hours and exhausted, or burnt out or preoccupied, and humming beeping machines to keep them company.
Tubes were everywhere but what I remember most was
Dry parched lips
It was the dry lips that bothered me the most. So after checking the machines making sure everything was working, checking vital signs, and medications were infusing I would try to relieve the dry mouth. If the person was conscience I would offer them ice chips...most weren’t....most were on ventilators and were NPO (nothing by mouth). So I would clean their mouths. Back in those days we had Lemon Glycerin Swabs which were like giant Q tips with a lemon flavor. People who were thirsty and couldn’t drink for a few hours would refuse them. Those with dry cracked lips bit on them, sucked on them, holding tight to the swab as if it would revive them perhaps it was a reminder of life or a reminder of hope..... Or maybe a reflex
Yes, Jesus was dehydrated I am certain of that and I know that his thirst was much more than dehydration.
He had endured horrific pain. The life was draining out of him he was indeed parched in body and spirit..... Water is life...... he had told the Samaritan woman that the water he gives will become in them a spring of water gushing up into eternal life. I wonder what he was thinking....I wonder if he felt like a phony a con artist. I wonder if he believed anything that he had said.
He was tortured, he was mocked, he was dying. Worse, though, than the pain and the mocking and the fact that he was certainly going to die soon, many of his friends had abandoned him. Who can blame them though? They were afraid, things were NOT going as they had planned and nothing would ever be the same. They had deserted him and it seemed as though God had deserted him. God’s voice, that voice he was so accustomed to hearing was gone as well.
Have you ever felt abandoned? Alone? Afraid? Have you ever felt that you would never hear God again?
I have. People have hurt me, done horrible things to me and I wonder. Where the hell is God I mean really where!
All week a part of psalm 63 has been rattling around in my brain. Days before I even thought about which “last word” I wanted to talk about, these words were in my thoughts and on my tongue:
O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
What imagery! Can you see the cracks in the land the dry adobe here in Sonoma County that cracks and pulls apart in the summer. Weary, burnt out, exhausted, over used land. Today is Earth Day as well as Good Friday...and you know what to do.
Back to Jesus...I wonder......... In the midst of his agony........did that psalm run through his mind He said I thirst. Was he calling out to God only managing to squeak out “I Thirst”
Water is essential for life so a thirst for water is a thirst for life......
A thirst for life is a thirst for God who promises streams in the desert who promises to heal, to sustain us and to wipe away every tear.....
Sometimes in life those promises seem impossible. From the cross, I suspect that those promises appeared to be very far away.... Yet Jesus said I Thirst. It is my prayer that we can all say that in our own way when the distance between ourselves and our friends or ourselves and God seems so far apart we too can say I thirst.
I thirst
