Storm Glory

Psalm 29 traces the fury of a thunderstorm blowing in from the sea.

It whips through the northern forests, tears across the land and into the Negev in the south.

It splits oak trees asunder and shatters the mighty cedars of Lebanon. It strips the forests bare.


The singer revels in the majestic roar of waves and thunder, howling wind, crack of lightning and reverberation of trees crashing to the ground. Nature is majestic, wild and breath-taking!

Water, wind and weather dwarf our pride. Sailors, mountain-climbers and airline pilots learn to respect nature’s laws. But this storm-song tells us more.

All that the Rain Brings

I will send rain on your land in its season,

both autumn and spring rains,

Deuteronomy 11:14

At the Canadian Clay and Glass Museum in Waterloo, Ontario I saw a sculpture titled All That the Rain Brings by British Columbia ceramic artist Mary Fox.

Let me try to describe it and interpret what it seems to me the title and the sculpture suggest about rain.

All That The Rain Brings
Sculptor Mary Fox
Photographer: Janet Dwyer

The uppermost of three small bowls is tilted down-wards. Rain is sheer gift. It comes from above and what it brings is life-giving. It supports us biologically as surely as the wavy ceramic column supports the bowl physically and artistically.

The downward flow of the three bowls follows the flow of rain from cloud to earth and streams and back to the sea. The three bowls suggest multiple ways that rain sustains our lives physically, economically, spiritually.  We use water for drinking, washing, cooking, agriculture, industry and recreation.

The bowls are positioned erratically suggesting that the rain is not a neat and tidy process. We can’t control when the rains come – they may be late or early - doesn't rain often seem inconvenient? -  sometimes the rain is too much or too little. None of the bowls is level as if to remind us that we can’t hold on to water.

This sculpture looks to me like a haggard old woman – and perhaps that’s what we are as we wait for rain. We do our best to catch it and keep it, and we manage it as we can, but at best we’re at the mercy of the elements. We are receptors of nature’s bounty.

And maybe that’s part of what rain brings us – an extravagant gift, a humble reminder of our identity and lessons in patience, humility, gratitude and . . . wonder! As dramatically as rain brings the dry land back to life, so this gift - wonderful in every way - renews hope and energizes life. I'm pretty glad about that.

Generous Source of all that the rain brings,

how gladly we welcome your gift of rain. 

How vital it is -- and yet how anonymous You are.

Teach us your name, your largesse, your modesty.

Help us learn to tilt our bowls to others

as freely as You have tilted yours towards us. Amen

If interested, you can see more work by Mary Fox at the Jonathan Bancroft-Snell Gallery in London, Ontario - http://www.jonathons.ca/

Tipping Point

Hurricane Igor slammed into Newfoundland this week with ferocious winds and rain.

They saw it coming but were powerless to stop it or steer it out to sea.

An 80 year old man was swept away in the flood along with bridges, roads and homes.

We wonder. . . and we ask Why?

Job and his friends wore themselves out pondering the 'Why?' question. Sometimes our best explanations don’t fit.
Eventually God steps into their conversation and asks more questions:

Clouds

It’s overcast and rainy today; the sky is gray.

But last week under a clear sky and the setting sun, I watched magnificent clouds for half an hour. They curled and curved under the flow of wind and shifted through red, violet and purple shades.

Nature’s poetry in motion.

I remember last year flying through a lightening storm over the Appalachians, as electricity forked from one cloud to another, lighting up the sky in an exhilarating display of power and surprise.

Into Thin Air

NOTE - This particular post by far the most popular entry for 2010 on this Wonder of Water blog. I'd love to know why. Please add your thoughts below.

It happens in coffee shops day and night around the world . . . 

It wafts from the breath of every person on the planet . . .    

Mist rises from golf courses and wetlands ... Steam soars from industry stacks and tree-tops ... 

Water evaporates from the Bay of Bengal and transpires from plants.

Evapo-transpiration feeds the hydrologic cycle – that process that circulates water, purges the air and nourishes life on earth.

Resurrection

I got my feet soaked this morning walking barefoot in the grass - not from rain or puddles, but from dew - cool ... refreshing ... delicious dew!

My posts this week explored two of over thirty references to dew in the Bible. Here's one more to finish the week.

Isaiah saw the morning dew as a fore-shadowing, a sign from the earth that can’t keep its secret, a hint to anyone who is listening between the lines, a promise of resurrection.

Many Biblical scholars maintain that Israel had no theology of life beyond death until shortly before the time of Christ. But eight hundred earlier Isaiah had a vision:

Dew of Heaven

Moses stood on the verge of the Promised Land and prayed for God’s blessing on the twelve tribes. For Joseph's tribes Moses prayed,

"May the LORD bless his land with the precious dew from heaven above and with the deep waters that lie below; … with the best gifts of the earth and its fullness and the favor of him who dwelt in the burning bush.
Deuteronomy 33:13-16

A prayer for ‘precious dew’ would mean a lot to people who have lived in the dry desert for 40 years. Add ‘the deep waters that lie below’, the unseen wealth of aquifers, and you have the conditions for bountiful agricultural prosperity.

Moses believed that God is not stingy, that God would prosper Joseph’s tribes lavishly. Abundance, not scarcity is God’s signature, though with an invisible anonymous hand.

Gideon's Dry Fleece

"Your doubts will evaporate like dew when the waiting is over."

Luci Shaw, Water My Soul.

Call him a reluctant warrior. For seven years, God was silent as the marauding Midianites raided their farms at harvest time.  So when Yahweh’s messenger called Gideon a ‘mighty man of valor’ and told him that God was with him, the man was a tad skeptical. Waiting can do that to you.

It seemed to Gideon that God was more absent than active, more a god of legends than a God of the real world where thieves plundered crops with impunity. When the angel told Gideon to ‘gird up his strength’ and deliver Israel, he asked for a sign and received  dramatic evidence of God's power. But it was not enough.

Wells of Joy - Part Two

Share the well,

Share with your brother

Share the well, my friend

It takes a deeper well

to love one another

Share the well, my friend

Caedmon’s Call, “Share the Well”

People who experience God’s well of Joy just can’t keep the pleasure for themselves, especially when they see the suffering of others.

Paul Loney is a Canadian water engineer. He and his wife Grace saw the heart-wrenching effects of bad water in the Ethiopian village of Keraro, home to about 5,000 people.

Wells of Joy - Part One

After a seven-year search, the Jewish settlers at the fledgling Kibbutz Na’an finally found water. Their joy was ecstatic; their future secured.




A dancer in the kibbutz named Else Dublin choreographed a simple dance to celebrate the event. And today, 72 years later, it is one of the most popular Israeli folk dances.

Mayim, Mayim! (Water, Water!) is a circle dance, so it is easy to imagine dancing around a well. The words of the song come directly from Isaiah 12.

‘Water, water, water.
With joy you shall draw water from the wells of salvation!’

Even though Kibbutz Na’an is proudly unreligious, the words of Isaiah seemed the perfect expression of their joy.

Spring Up, O Well!

It's Labor Day.  So here is a biblical story about water and work.

Towards the end of Israel’s 40 year migration from Egypt, the people and their flocks were - as always - in dire need of water. God told Moses, 'you assemble the people; I’ll provide the water.'

The next thing we know, the people are celebrating around a fresh flowing artesian spring. Imagine the ooohs and ahhhs of relief, the laughter and splashing, the cheers of thirsty, sun-weary souls enjoying fresh cold spring-water.

No ordinary woman

September 3, 1943, sixty-seven years ago today, my mother and father were married. 

Continuing this week’s theme of wells and marriage, and in my late parent's honor, here is an interesting water story from The Book of Joshua.

When the Hebrew tribes invaded Canaan sometime around the 14th century BCE, the city of Debir in the northern Negev proved a tough town to conquer.

As the commander in charge of the southern campaign, Caleb offered an incentive to whoever successfully captured the city - his daughter Acsah’s hand in marriage. Her cousin Othniel rose to the challenge and won both the battle and the bride.

Offering a daughter as the prize for military victory hints at the position of women in that society, but this story also shows us the resourcefulness of this woman. She is not just a trophy wife. She understands the realities of life.

For her dowry, Acsah asks her father for farmland. She knows that marriage alone is not enough, that a young family needs some real estate as well as love to live on.

Jacob's Second Kiss

Josef von Führich,  Jacob Encountering Rachel, 1836

It is only the second kiss mentioned in the Bible – and it happened beside a village well.

No doubt Rebekah told her son Jacob, how as a young woman she had watered a stranger’s camels and gained a husband for her initiative (see previous posts). Now, twenty years later, Jacob himself stood by that same well.

The most breath-taking girl he had ever seen was leading her flock to water. Some dim-witted shepherds were loitering, waiting for help to move the large stone well-cover so they could water their herds (and perhaps ogle or flirt with the girl). Jacob, a master of spontaneity, single-handedly hefted the massive stone away from the well-mouth and drew water for the woman and her sheep.