The Woman Who Walked Thirty Miles for Water

In 2019, a severe drought gripped the Turkana region of northern Kenya. Wells dried up. Rivers turned to cracked mud. Journalist Abdi Latif Dahir documented how a woman named Mary Athieno walked thirty miles round-trip to the nearest functioning borehole, carrying a yellow jerrycan on her back under a sun that reached 110 degrees. She did this three times a week. When asked why she didn't relocate, she said something striking: "I know where the water is. I will keep going back."

That single-minded desperation is exactly what David describes in Psalm 63. Writing from the wilderness of Judah — a landscape not so different from Turkana — he declares, "My soul thirsts for You; my flesh faints for You, in a dry and weary land where there is no water." David wasn't merely being poetic. He knew physical thirst. And he was saying that his longing for the Almighty ran even deeper than that.

But here is what transforms this psalm from a cry into a song: David found what he was seeking. His soul was "satisfied as with fat and rich food." The desperate thirst gave way to overflowing praise.

Mary Athieno kept walking because she knew where the water was. David kept seeking because he knew where God was. And the beautiful promise of this psalm is that the God we desperately seek is already reaching back — "Your right hand upholds me."

The question is never whether the water is there. The question is whether we are thirsty enough to walk toward it.