I spend half my day asking animals "What's the matter?"
"What's the matter, Mollie? Why are you running in circles in the dining room and looking angsty? I know you didn't poo on the carpet, so that leaves eating something. WHAT DID YOU EAT?"
"What's the matter, Trippy? You look bilious. Did you eat a poison spider? Oh crap, you ate a poison spider, didn't you? Oh....never mind, I guess it was just gas."
"Old Lady, what's the matter? Why are you standing next to the food can and screaming? What's that you say? Too old to chow down on the dry food Trippy eats? Need soft food for your poor toothless mouth? POOR BABY!"
I should make them each a cue card that reads "Either I ate something or I want to eat something or I need to get rid of something I ate yesterday." That would solve it, and I could stop asking that question and get back to watching YouTube.

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."
Psalm 139:23, 24

"It's no surprise to me, I am my own worst enemy; 'cause every now and then I kick the livin' **** outta me."
LIT, "My Own Worst Enemy."

Satan is evil. Satan is not a little red dude in a jump suit with a pitchfork and a goatee. He is big and powerful, and he hates my guts. He hates that I am given a redemption he was denied. He hates that I, filthy little worm that I am, have access to the Glory of God, while he is doomed beneath it. He wants me to die, and if not, to at least be ineffectual for the Kingdom. To do this, he will use every power at his disposal to steal, kill, and destroy in my life. He has been alive since before the earth was created, knows the ins and outs of humanity, and is wiser than most other creatures alive. He will use this knowledge to destroy me in any way possible.
And yet, I am not as frightened of him as I am of myself.
See, it goes like this: God promised victory over Satan in the end. I know that if I abide in Christ, and He in me, I can ask whatever I will, and it's a-gonna happen, and that's one tool Satan doesn't have. So his mission now is to keep me from abiding in Christ.
This is dreadfully easy, as I'd rather play on the computer than read my Bible.
I'm not going to lie. I'm no good at it. When I wake up in the morning, my first inclination is to reach down and grab the laptop, rather than reaching over and grabbing the Word. More often than not, I do, until guilt overwhelms me and I put the puter away or turn it on Pandora in favor of Scripture.
On a good day.
God knew how hard this would be for us as humans. He knew, and He made a way out. As I am famous (or rather, notorious) for saying in Homegroup, "Everyone has a different Jesus-shaped hole, and none of our holes are exactly the same." I was tired, get off me.
God gave us a thirst for Home. He gave us a burning, unquenchable desire to be with Him. We all have it, whether we know it or not. We can use a million other things to fill it, but the thirst will still be there. Even when we quench it properly, with the presence of God, it will be there all over again in the morning, demanding to be filled.
When I taught Nurse Aides, I had a student who was, and still is, one of my very favorites. She is bright, funny, cheerful, a hard worker, and genuinely cares about people. One day, we were having a particularly grueling clinical. A group of us were in a patient room trying, for the forty-fifth time, to learn how to take someone's blood pressure. It's a lot harder than it sounds. We were all sweaty and cranky and I had two bruised arms from letting the students practice on me. This student poked me and asked if I had any gum. It just so happened that I did, and as I was pulling a stick out for her, she told me, "Thanks, I'm thirsty."
"...You're what now? You're thirsty?"
"Yeah."
Hydration is one of my big pet peeves, especially since I am so poor at staying properly irrigated myself. "Hon, there's a water cooler in the front lobby. Go get a drink."
"No, that's okay. I want to stay here and watch what's going on. I'll be fine."
Anyone who knows me will not doubt what happened next. I reached up (she's quite a bit taller than me), grabbed her by the ear, and dragged her down the hall, through the locked doors, and into the front lobby. I did not release her ear until she had a full cup of water in her hand and was drinking it.
"Now, what did you learn?"
"I learned not to make Erin mad."
"Try again."
"I learned not to chew gum instead of drinking water."
"Right. You're leaving yourself open for all kinds of problems if you let yourself get dehydrated, especially at work."
"Okay. My ear hurts."

See, her body was telling her that she needed water via a dry mouth. Chewing gum would have pacified that cue, but it wouldn't have fixed the problem. She was thirsty. Her cells and tissues needed fluid to keep working. She could have ignored it, but it would have hurt her. Over time, the cumulative damage of denying your body fluid can lead to organ failure.
See where this little metaphor is going? Good, then I don't need to tell you.
Most vices are the result of a desperate attempt to fill our Jesus-shaped void. When I say desperate, I mean it. Check out some of Webster's definitions for desperate:
1: arising from or marked by despair or loss of hope;
4: showing extreme courage; especially of actions courageously
undertaken in desperation as a last resort;
5: showing extreme urgency or intensity especially because of
great need or desire;
6: fraught with extreme danger; nearly hopeless

I think 5 is my favorite. We are a fat-cat world, and most of America has never had to go hungry a day in their lives. A while back, I did a ten day fast....NOT one of my best decisions ever. I learned what it was like to be without food. Because of chronic hypoglycemia, I never hit that phase most people hit of no hunger. I stayed painfully, achingly hungry the full ten days, and there were times that I was desperate to eat, and I was on my face before God praying for just one more day of grace. I think we may have forgotten what desperation is like. We have tried to still that thirst within, and have managed to blunt the knife edge, when all we need to do is drink from the well that is RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR FREAKIN' FACES!
Seriously! It's there! It may not feel like it's helping anything at first, but God shows Himself faithful every stinkin' time.
Before I sound hypocritical, let me clarify: I'm thirsty, too, and I'm among the worst of gum-chewers. Denial is the most addictive of all drugs, and I have used all kinds of distractions to help me continue it.
What distractions, you say?
None of your business. Figure out your own and leave me alone.
My point is that this thirst is a Godsend, literally. Without it we would recede into apathy, and miss the beautiful letdown that comes from humbling ourselves before God and telling Him that we can't quench the thirst on our own. It's a process that has to be repeated over and over, but it's worth it. If I could stop fighting myself long enough to let God work, I'd be in pretty good shape. But as you will find if you take a quick read through these archives, I'm more inclined to the moronic.
Oh well. Thank God for loving morons.