Parched

When you are so thirsty your lips begin to pucker.  That is what I think of when I hear the word parched.  I think of fruit that has dried up, or a lake that is showing more of its bed than it has water.  Parched happens when there is extreme heat and something becomes dehydrated.  The water that once teemed with life has now been evaporated to the last drop.

Have you ever had a day when you just couldn’t get enough to drink?  No matter what you drank you were still thirsty?  A day when your thirst was so prominent it distracted you from everything.

There is a thirst of soul that we have. It can temporarily be satiated.  Like the thirst of our body.  We can have a coke, tea, lemonade, or coffee when we are thirsty, but eventually we will need water.  A lack of drinking water causes many health problems.  When God created rivers and streams  He didn’t fill them with Coke.  No ma’am! He filled them with what we needed.

The thirst of the soul comes from our innate need to be filled.  It is a cavernous need that God built into us so that we would reach for Him, that we would know our need for Him.  Ever been where you couldn’t get enough of anything.  You just wanted to fill the void?  Me too.

I tried to fill the parched places of my soul so they would just stop screaming. I was dying on the inside and desperate for love, but I kept filling myself with all the wrong things.

Drugs, alcohol, people pleasing, sex, food, shopping, and whatever I thought would fill that parched place.

But nothing did.  It only only left me drier.  It only left a desert where life used to be.  I had to have the next best thing to try to fill up.  I had to have more and more of that next best thing.  Only the next best thing was a lie.  It left me worse off than I was before.  It left me so thirsty my insides where showing up on the outside screaming for a drink of something real.  And, they were ugly.    No one wanted to see the reality of a deserted soul.

Until one day.  Living water showed up for me.  It didn’t look like what I thought it should, it didn’t smell like anything I had before, and it sure did leave me with an awful reflection of who I really was.  In fact it scared me to death, but I couldn’t help but want to drink.

Now I am another Samaritan woman.  A woman who met Jesus at a well of living water and asked Him for a drink.  He told me things I didn’t even know about myself.

I started this new blog to minister to women who are in the healing processes of addiction of any kind, childhood sexual abuse, and post-abortion trauma, or living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I am a woman who God uses in all her weakness. I suffer from panic attacks, but I preach anyway.  I am a female ordained and licensed minister. I am church planting , counseling women at the local pregnancy support center as a peer counselor, raising four kids, and by God’s grace still married to an amazing man.

I will be posting here once a week.  My prayer is that this blog will minister to you as you sit down at the well and receive living water from Jesus.