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I don’t read a lot of blogs of people I don’t know…but I really like Josh Bottomly (joshbottomly.blogspot.com). He’s a beautiful writer. He works with high school students and wrote this as a chapel sermon at his school regarding a group of students who engaged in a  project inspired by charitywater.org:

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As I reflect theologically with you on this topic of water, I am reminded of where Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, proclaims, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

If my wife and I are learning anything personally as we journey deeper into the heart of the orphan world in Ethiopia, it is that there is a blessing that comes when we seek to live intentionally in the tension between the absence of justice and the presence of justice.

Between the reality of 4.4 million Ethiopian orphans and the dream of empty orphanages.

Between the tragedy of the way the creation presently is – marred and spoiled by corruption and greed – and the fairy tale at the heart of the gospel of the way the creation will be – restored and renewed by God’s healing and love.

No doubt, it’s always a struggle and challenge to live within that messy tension of the now and the will be.

But that is where we become thirsty people.

Thirsty for a world where orphans are picked up from the trash heaps of society and placed in loving homes.

Thirsty for a world where 6 out of 6, instead of 1 out of 6 people have access to clean water.

And thirsty for a world where young women no longer have to walk 3 miles a day to fetch clean water, but get to stay in school, and read and write and draw and add and subtract and discover the kinds of new knowledge that will give birth to the future revelations of the world.
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In closing, my hope and prayer for each of you seniors,

and for all of us,

is that you stay thirsty.

And that that thirst will grow long and wide and high and deep

in the subterranean places within us,

until it spills and gushes over into a

lifestyle of pursuing justice and mercy and dignity for the least of these,

until the New Age, when as the prophet Isaiah imagines,

“the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God,

as the waters cover the sea.”

Amen.