Walking with the Wise #472: Drink Deeply

“Like cold water to a thirsty soul,


so is good news from a far country.”
—Proverbs 25:25

Before texting, email, Twitter, and cell phones evaporated time and distance, people relied on messengers to bring news. Messengers that came from a far country usually brought news of the status of battle or family. Good news was refreshing, but bad news was draining.

The word used for Gospel is "good news" and while today’s proverb is much more literal, there is a greater spiritual truth that it points to—God’s saving message to man. When the great Indian revolutionary Gandhi was asked to speak to people, he would often reply, “My life is my message.” Jesus’ life was God’s message to man. He came from the far country of heaven to save us, forgive our sins, rescue us from death and give us His life. We are now strangers to this world, exiled from our heavenly home, waiting for the day when we will go to be with Him.

In speaking of our heavenly home, what C.S. Lewis called the “faroff country,” he said that God has placed within each of us a yearning for it. And though we may call it by many names, we will never truly understand what this longing is, until we get to glory. As Lewis wrote,

“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”—C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.

The greatest news ever to come to us is from the distant country of heaven. It is the cool drink to our thirsty souls. It quenches our thirst by acting as a deposit of blessing that will only fully be realized in the world to come.

May God enable each one of us to drink deeply from the risen Christ, who imparts spiritual life to us now, and will give us the fullness of His resurrection life at the end of time when we will be forever with Him. Amen.