He drives hundreds of kilometers in a car held together with rust and prayer to share the gospel with a village of eighteen souls, many of whom are too drunk and desperate to hear. Sometimes God does not save them, sometimes He does. When He does save them they beg for Bibles and my friend gives them Bibles if he has any to give. In his country Bibles are still legal but are difficult to obtain and expensive.
Winters are so cold the large river that divides his territory freezes and so do the fuel lines in his automobile. If he can keep his car warm enough to start the freeze makes some of the outlying villages more accessible than in the summer because in the summer what roads there are disintegrate into deep sticky mud and knee-deep potholes.
He travels as he is able and writes me the stories and with the stories he sends pictures. One picture showed his car sitting in an icy snow-covered village square with a fur coat covering the engine block, another was nothing but green hills covered with yellow and purple spring flowers. Many pictures are portraits of the people he visits. He tells me their stories and their names and we pray for them.
My friend writes me the stories using Google translator because I don’t speak his language and he doesn’t speak mine. Usually, Google translator is accurate in general and laughably poor in the specific. Once, the specific translation was deeply perfect. My friend wrote that a man had cried out to God for salvation, and Google translated that the new brother had “voiced the big thirst” for Jesus Christ.
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Scripture gives story after story of God’s people “voicing the big thirst” for Him and receiving rivers of living water from the Source.
Abraham “voiced the big thirst” in Genesis 15 when he said “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless….” God brought him outside and told him that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars.
Exodus 17 tells the story of the Israelites thirsting in the wilderness. Moses cried out to God “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” God commanded Moses to take a rock and strike it, and rivers of saving water flowed from the rock.
On the Emmaus Road Cleopus and his companion voiced the big thirst to Christ Himself when they said “we had hoped that he was the one….” Jesus answered by giving them Himself as He had been revealed in the Scriptures they knew and had trusted all their lives. “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road…?” they said after their wells were filled.
God gave the Rock of Ages to the Israelites and water flowed from an impossible and singular source only after it had been struck with Moses’ staff. Jesus filled the empty well of the travelers on the Emmaus road with the only thing that could fill their wells of the hearts and make them burn, which was Himself.
The only way the empty well in your heart can be filled is if you Voice the Big Thirst for Christ to the only One who can fill it with living water.
“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water…. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:10, 14
Kathy Leicester 