TRISTAN SHERWIN

‘Crying may last for a night,

but joy comes in the morning.’

Psalm 30:5b NCV

Advent agitates our thirst.

All of us, in one way or another, know what it is to be thirsty. Certain terrains in our lives feel desolate and abrasive — seasons where the emotional heat is relentless, where sorrow cracks us open, and where even the smallest hope feels like a distant mirage. We grow weary and parched, longing for refreshment, for relief, and ultimately for release. We thirst for justice, for vindication, for healing, for recognition. We long for the floodgates to open and wash away what weighs us down.

But our longing is not merely a survival instinct. It is not just water we crave. Beneath our thirst for relief lies a deeper desire for joy — for life in its fullness. We want not only to endure but to celebrate; not only to breathe but to sing.

And so we wait — not only for God to make the parched and barren places of our lives stream with water, but for God to turn that water into wine. We wait for morning to break with the kind of delight that can only come from the One who makes all things new.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis writes of a stream of water so clear, so radiant, that the characters fear it must be poison — only to find that drinking it is “like drinking light.” Their thirst isn’t just quenched; it is transfigured into joy, into something more alive than they imagined water could ever make them. Advent invites us into the same possibility: that God’s coming not only restores but transforms, not only sustains but exhilarates.

This life-giving stream is the second water source encountered in Lewis’s tale. The first stream, on Deathwater Island, also looked clear and captivating — yet its waters turned everything they touched into lifeless gold. It shimmered with the promise of joy, but sank all who drank from it. All too often, in our search for joy in the wrong places, the very things we pursue to satisfy our hearts leave us heavier, emptier, and more burdened than before.

When we wait, temptation’s parodies glisten all the more.

But hold firm — life in all its fullness is at hand.