Bonhoeffer's Thirst in Tegel Prison

In April 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo and locked inside Tegel Military Prison in Berlin. His cell was small, the blanket filthy, the guards hostile. For the first twelve days, they refused him a Bible. A pastor — stripped of pulpit, congregation, and freedom — sat in a concrete room with nothing but silence and memory.

Yet something remarkable emerged in his letters. Rather than despair, Bonhoeffer wrote of a deepening hunger for God that the prison walls could not contain. He told his friend Eberhard Bethge that the Psalms had become his daily bread, recited from memory in the predawn darkness. He described worship not as something he had lost but as something that had followed him into the cell. "The God who is with us," he wrote, "is the God who forsakes us — and the God who lets us live in His presence."

David wrote Psalm 63 in another wilderness — the barren Judean desert, fleeing from Saul, cut off from the tabernacle. Yet his soul clung to the Almighty with a thirst fiercer than his need for water. "Your steadfast love is better than life," he declared — not from a place of comfort, but from scorched earth.

The deepest worship often rises from the emptiest places. When everything else is stripped away, the soul finally knows what it was always thirsting for.