Spiritual Dehydration

Spiritual Dehydration

March 27, 2011, 12:23 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

75% of our body is made up of water. So, you can understand the importance of drinking liquids during the day. Dehydration is a physical condition that happens to our body when we expend more fluids in the process of daily exertion than we put into our body. Breath, bodily excrements and sweat are the main ways our body losses fluid. The way of replenishing our bodies is to give it the liquids it requires.

Symptoms of dehydration are:

Dry mouth, eyes stop making tears, sweating may stop, muscle cramps, nausea, vomiting, heart palpitations and lightheadedness (especially when standing).

If you are suffering these symptoms it is important that the body immediately have fluids for rehydration.

The problem with dehydration is that you don’t always know that you are suffering from it until you are directly in the center of it. It may take for you to suffer the worst of it’s symptoms before you realize that dehydration has taken a hold of your body. You can be working so hard that you have missed the fact that your body is desperate for water.

The Israelites are dehydrated or worse. They are not only dehydrated, but without the means of drink to replenish themselves. They are beginning to die.
The people of Israel are stuck wandering in the wilderness of sin for 40 years. They had been too fearful to enter into the land of such great promise. So, the almighty has led them in circles in this wilderness. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had saved them from the slavery that they found themselves suffering at the hands of the Egyptians.

When armies pursued them to bring them back into slavery, their leader Moses raised his staff and it parted the Red Sea so the nation could cross to the other side on dry land. When Moses lowered his staff the sea walls closed in on the pursuing army and engulfed them.

Even though the almighty had led them out of captivity their faith has waned. This is why they find themselves wandering. God has provided them Manna to eat, but at this point they lack water.

We see here a Moses who is still an unsure leader. From the beginning he needed help because he has a speech impediment. He is unsure that a nation would believe and follow a prominent murderer. Now, you can hear the halting tone in his voice when he talks to God about his people’s anger. “God…um help, these people are about to throw stones at me until I die.”

So, God makes Moses act the leader. The creator tells Moses to take the same staff that he held high over the Red Sea and walk in the midst of the entire nation with the rest of its nation’s leaders following. Then he strikes a rock with God present. When he does this water flows from the rock and the people are saved. They call this place Testing and Dispute. This is because they tested the Lord by asking, “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”

We find ourselves in the midst of only 40 days of wandering and not 40 years. Yet, it is about at this point when we ask the same types of questions. Is the Lord in our midst or not? It may be the painful fact of our existence to find that we are in the midst of dehydration of a spiritual nature. We may find our souls to be like the Horseshoe crab that has wandered up on the beach and looks fine from the outside. When turned over it is revealed that there is nothing there but a shell.

Spiritual dehydration is a serious human condition. Without proper treatment it can lead to malaise, nihilism, low self worth, narcissism, addiction, fatalism, apathy or idolatry. Just like the nation of Israel we must realize what we are suffering can cause us spiritual death. Then we must question whether God is still in our midst. If absent we must reverently re-seek the divine.

Fortunately, during our season of wanderings we are moving toward the one that has self described himself as living water. Those who find him will thirst no more. It is time for us to realize that the salvation that we seek is in our midst and take the hydration that faith can give us. It will reinvigorate our lives and bring them new meaning.

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