I felt the lump in my chest grow and the tears well up in my eyes. Someone else was slowly dispensing the good news to family and friends. Someone else was dreaming big dreams and making big plans and basking in the almost surreal joy of it all. Someone else was pregnant, and it wasn’t me.

When I got the news of yet another person I know having a baby a few weeks ago, my first instinct was to text my squad, the people who have walked with me through all of the hard things lately. I would probably ask for prayer, but what I really wanted was validation, that this sucked and that I had every right to pick up a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, plop down on my couch, and cry for a bit.

But something stopped me.

As I picked up my phone to text that first person, I heard God loud and clear from somewhere in my heart: People aren’t gonna cut it.

And immediately, I knew what He meant.

I knew in that moment that no amount of platitudes, of sympathy, or of pity partying could actually change anything. While we have the best support squad around, I knew that texting another friend about yet another disappointment wasn’t going to heal my heart, give me lasting peace, or fix my situation.

As I stood in my kitchen, phone in hand, it became clear what I needed to do: I needed to seek the one who can do all of those things. I needed to seek God.

In John 4, Jesus tells the Samarian woman, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.”

I realized in that moment that I had been drinking too heavily of the wrong kind of water. Instead of drinking from streams of grace and from fountains of peace, I’d been gulping gallons upon gallons of water from this world. By relying too heavily on people to give me peace and make it all okay, I stayed thirsty.

While God gave us people who can help us bear our burdens, they can’t give us the lasting peace that He can. They can’t provide a steadfast spirit that can endure incredible heartache. They can’t give us an eternal perspective that allows us to see past the challenging now. They can’t promise us that everything will be okay.

We can have all of those things. We just need to stop drinking the wrong kind of water.

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