How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting
Post 37: Worshipping—Loving God or Pursuing False Lovers of the Soul
As we progress through the stages of healing, we are transformed from regrouping to waiting, from deadening to wailing, from despair to weaving, and from digging cisterns to worshipping.
Digging Cisterns Described
God describes digging cisterns in Jeremiah 2:13.
“My people have committed two sins: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
In the ANE, you had two choices for life-giving water. You could settle near a clear, pure, bubbling spring of fresh underground water, or you could dig a cistern which captured run-off water and held it in a stagnant well that often cracked leaking in more filth and leaking out water.
Spiritual cistern digging involves rejecting God as our Spring of Living Water because we see Him as unsatisfying, unholy, and unloving. Once we reject the only Being in the universe who could ever satisfy the last aching abyss of our souls, we choose to turn to substitutes—worthless, putrid substitutes—cisterns.
Back in the Casket
Put yourself back in that casket. You’ve tried to claw your way out through immediate gratification. Your bowl of soup may be power, prestige, pleasure, pleasing people, or any multitude of pathways of relating. Since soup never satisfies the soul, only the stomach, you still ache. What to do with your ache?
Well, if you face it, then you have to admit your insufficiency. That simply will not do. So you deaden it. You block out and suppress the reality of your hungry heart. Keep busy. Fantasize. Climb the corporate ladder. These tricks of the godless trade work no better than immediate gratification. Somewhere, deep down inside, despair brews. “Is this all there is?”
Now what? If you follow the beaten path, then despair guides you to false lovers. Idols of the heart. Digging cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Something or someone who will rescue you from agony’s clutches—or so you imagine.
Is That All There Is?
Now what? Our choice is clear. Tomorrow we entice with the clear choice—worshipping God in the midst of life’s losses.
