Fighting off Spiritual Dehydration

I have a black thumb. Ask anyone who knows me well. When I come home with a new potted plant, my husband looks at me as if to say, “Why? You know it will be dead in a matter of weeks. Why did you spend our money on that?” And he’s not wrong! My latest floral adventure was to the tune of $50 for two potted plants. They have probably been my longest living greenery attempt. I purchased them in the middle of Rona’s shutdown and was able to truly give them the TLC they deserved. Then we started going back to a more normal schedule. My poor plants are Exhibit A in the testimony to a crazy, busy life.

As I’ve reflected upon the pitiful health of my plants and thought about the fact that I’ve completely abandoned them and their need for water, I started thinking about how our own personal (spiritual) lives can be much like my withering flowers. Because my plants have been neglected, they are so incredibly thirsty and in dire need of attention. Can you relate to that at all? Do you ever feel like your spiritual life is parched? I have struggled to juggle everything now that we've gone back to normal (hence my long lag in new blog posts).

The Warning Signs

Over the past few years, I have learned more about dehydration. I thought it was something that only happened to people in the most extreme states of water deprivation. I researched dehydration a few years ago when I was preparing to deliver a devotional about Jesus’ living water. What I learned was very surprising:

• 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated.

• Dehydration causes fatigue. (That explains a lot!)

• Thirst means you are dehydrated. (How often have you been thirsty?)

• Dehydration causes foggy memory and irritability. (Hmm… that also explains a lot!)

• You can’t survive more than a few days without water.

(Facts found at https://dripdrop.com/blogs/news/6-dehydration-facts-may-surprise and https://natura-01.businesscatalyst.com/buzz/7-surprising-dehydration-statistics-and-facts-infographic.)

Do these facts surprise you like they did me? I remember the last fact from science class in my younger days, but the other tidbits were quite intriguing. I’m certain that more times than not, I am dehydrated. I have to force myself to drink water and I’m certain this explains a lot of my fatigue, thirst, foggy memory, and more. In the same way that my plants are showing me physical signs of dehydration, our bodies show us signs of dehydration when we neglect to drink enough waterl. The same applies to our spiritual lives.

Simple thirst is a sign that our bodies are not well hydrated. What are the warning signs of spiritual thirst? Could a poor attitude be a sign of spiritual dehydration? What about our patience level, our thoughts, or how we treat people? When my kids have been unkind, or selfish, or impatient, I spout off to them, “Check your heart.” What I really want them to do is figure out what heart issue is causing them to act the way they are. I use this on myself as well. When my thoughts aren’t what they should be, my tolerance level is very low, my joy feels far away, or my perspective is negative, I can almost always trace these warning signs back to spiritual dehydration. Out of curiosity, I looked up what good ole’ Merriam-Webster has to say about the word dehydrate. The 2nd definition the dictionary gives is, “to deprive of vitality or savor.” Wow! That sounds about right. When I have neglected to feed my spiritual life, my vitality is gone.

Most recently, our family has been delivered from the Rona shutdown back into our normal, busy life- propelled by four very active kiddos. I really liked the slow pace of the Rona shutdown and said I didn’t ever want to go back to the normal chaos we had experienced before. Yet here we are: busier than ever. As our schedule has made it’s way back to normal, my spiritual nourishment has suffered. My quiet time is not as long, prayer time isn’t as frequent, and some days, time in the Word hasn’t happened at all.

Food for the Spiritual Soul

So how can we get back on track to ensure we're staying spiritually nourished? What immediately comes to mind is daily time in God’s Word and in prayer. I believe we can also be fed with Christian music, fellowship with other believers, Bible studies, church services and Sunday School. But to be fully, spiritually, nourished, I believe the key is time with the Lord in His Word and in prayer. You hear people say they go to church to be spiritually fed. I believe that if our only spiritual food is coming from our pastor’s sermon, or the lesson our Sunday School teacher delivers, we are not fully nourished. It’s like taking part in the appetizer, but not following through with the main course or the dessert. There is so much more to a nourished spiritual life than what we receive at church. My spiritual life has been a roller coaster of highs and lows; a garden of dry, barren soil at times and a luscious paradise at others. The number one factor in all the various conditions of my spiritual life has been my time, or lack of time, with God.

There have been times in my spiritually walk that a daily quiet time has been non-existent. The longer I went without a quiet time, the less I thought about it, the less I hungered for it, and the more my red flags of spiritual dehydration flapped in my face. I refer to Rona a lot in my writing because there’s a lot of beauty from ashes I have recognized and I owe God thanks for what the Rona shutdown brought into my life personally. This terrible pandemic forced my busy schedule to halt which opened up a beautiful thing called time.

Back in the spring, I began to ask God for a hunger for Him. I realized that my spiritual life looked much like my potted plants: withering, dehydrated, and nearly dead. In John 14:13-14, Jesus told His disciples,

“And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”

I am continuing to ask God for a hunger for Him like I’ve never had before. And guess what. He has delivered! One day this past week, I was reading my Bible and I just stopped in amazement. I was reading with such awe at how interesting and compelling His Word is. I’ve never before read the Bible with such excitement and amazement. There have been times in the past when I dreaded reading my Bible and did so only as a checklist of obedience. Please know that I’m not sharing this for a look-how-good-I-am effect. I am a self-proclaimed sinner full of filth apart from Him. That goodness and hunger and amazement is God, in me, answering my prayer, feeding my hunger, and nourishing my soul.

Isaiah 58:11 illustrates this so well:

“The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.”

What a beautiful picture of what we can experience with God. There’s no excuse for us to feel spiritually dehydrated.

Time to Prune

My best friend and I recently went for a walk and she was schooling me on how to take better care of my $50 plants. She is well aware of my black thumb and gently coaxes me every once in awhile on how to be a better gardener. She advised me to prune my plants. She said I needed to cut away all the dead parts to allow for new growth.

That afternoon, I did what she said and found that it was quite therapeutic. I gained a better understanding of why people enjoy gardening so much. It felt so good to cut away all the brown, ugly plant death and to be left with the green, living, growing plant life. I immediately thought about how this connects to our spiritual lives. What needs to be pruned in our lives in order to allow for growth? What is dead and ugly and choking out growth and fruitfulness in our spiritual lives? There’s so much that can distract us and keep us from thriving and living the abundant life God is offering us. I’m going to refer back to Merrium-Webser for a better understanding of prune: “to cut off or cut back parts of for better shape or more fruitful growth.” A deep reflection of what we watch, read, listen to, and spend our time on will offer a helpful glimpse into what needs to be “cut off or cut back.”

Check Your Garden

Maybe, instead of telling my kids and myself to, “Check your heart!” I need to instead respond with “Check your garden.” There are some questions that go along with this:

1. Is our garden, aka spiritual life, dying of thirst?

2. Are there warning signs alerting us to spiritual dehydration?

3. What are we doing to nourish our spiritual life?

4. What needs to be pruned from our daily life?

If you are experiencing malnourishment in your spiritual life, there is good news! Psalm 107:9 says,

“for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.”

God doesn’t want you to be spiritually dehydrated. He wants you to be like a “well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.” Are you spiritually parched? Ask Him to hydrate you! I have a challenge for you and for me both. For the next seven days, do these two things every day:

1. Pray and ask God to give you a desire for more of Him.

2. Follow your prayer with action by spending time in His word.

With our plants, we have to take action to keep them alive. With our bodies, we have to take action to keep them healthy. With our spiritual lives, it’s critical that we do our part to keep ourselves nourished. We can’t do it alone. We need our Gardener to water and feed us. John 6:35 says, “Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’”

We have to take the steps to come to Him and believe. I encourage you to take the challenge to ask God for a desire for more of Him and to spend time in His Word each day. See what happens after seven days of watering your spiritual garden, and then keep watering. A well nourished, thriving, abundant life awaits you, Friend!