The Call
A Homing Instinct

‘I spread out my hands to you;
my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.’  Psalm 143:6

We are spiritual beings.  As such, we have within us the capacity of longing.  When the Divine Architect planned our make-up, He decided to place within the heart of every one of us a longing for Himself.  The great majority of men and women do not understand this; they just know there is something in them which earth cannot satisfy.

All students of natural history know of the wonderful instinct of direction displayed by birds and beasts and fish.  It is called “the homing instinct”.  Cats and dogs find their way hoe across miles and miles of unknown country.  Pigeons fly direct to their homes after being taken hundreds of miles from their lofts.  Swallows and other birds take a confident journey between destinations which are thousands of miles apart.  Salmon return to spawn in the rivers of their birth.  Personally, I think nothing in al of nature is more wonderful than this amazing instinct of the lower creation for home.

Deep in the heart of every human being, too, is a homing instinct—a longing for God.  From the verse above it is obvious that the psalmist was in touch with the longings God had built into him.  He expresses this by saying that he ‘thirsts’, but the words ‘thirst’ and ‘longing’ are interchangeable, as a careful examination of Scripture will show.  What the psalmist was feeling was akin to the homing instinct in many animals.  However, such a feeling is much more than an instinct—it is a personal yearning of the soul after God.