Water on Thirsty Ground

In the summer of 2012 ninety percent of USA counties declared a state of emergency due to drought conditions. Corn crops shriveled and grain prices soared. 2013 doesn't look any more promising - at least in the West with low winter snowfall in the Rockies and projections that river-flows across the western states will be below average in 2013, as they have been for ten of the last 13 years.

Some ecologists today feel it is too late to talk about ‘sustainable’ strategies and focus instead on being ‘resilient’ as the earth's environment moves into deepening crisis.

Chronic drought can be debilitating, not just on the landscape, but in every area of life. Drought comes in many forms – when inspiration fails, when customers, job prospects or funding sources dry up … when marriage turns sour or brittle, or a daughter no longer calls home. Droughts like these cry out for relief just as desperately as farmers scan the sky for signs of rain.

That’s where some lines from the prophet Isaiah sing out to us with glistening hope:

I will pour water out on the thirsty land.
I will make streams flow on the dry ground.
I will pour out my Spirit on your children.
I will pour out my blessing on their children after them.
They will spring up like grass in a meadow.
They will grow like poplar trees near flowing streams.
Isaiah 44:3-4

Isaiah’s words came to the Jewish exiles in ancient Babylon as they wilted in ghetto communities and labor camps along the Euphrates. They were surrounded by physical water, but their souls were dry, their faith was parched, the future looked barren. Their children felt rootless with fading interest in the old traditions, culture and faith.

A 2012 study of church drop-out rates among young adults in Canada called Hemorrhaging Faith paints a similarly bleak picture. The landscape looks dry and unpromising and the status quo is surely unsustainable.

But barren landscapes don't tell the whole story. Isaiah invites us to embrace his song about rain and renewal, about God’s life-giving Spirit breaking into a new generation, about grass springing up in parched woodlots and poplars lining the riverbank – pictures of growth, vitality and a promising future.

This song – God’s song – counters the fear of the exiles – and the fears that paralyze us today. And parents, pastors and youth workers around the world can hear this song between the lines of Hemorrhaging Faith.

The larger context of Isaiah's song is about God as Creator and Redeemer, a God who calls us by name, who exposes the pipe-dream vanities, the contradictions and chaos that undermine our lives, a God who invites us instead into relationship and partnership in his mission to transform the dry and thirsty world.

That's a powerful song for today - the first day of Spring 2013. And Friday is World Water Day.  Until then, sing!

Image Credits:
Drought Map - Circle of Blue
Fresh Grass - Vanashree
Hemorrhaging Faith - James Penner & Asociates

A Garden Fountain

In recent posts we’ve been considering the significance of the Garden of Eden for human vocation and environmental stewardship.

Eden is also the Bible's original setting where a man and woman first set eyes on each other. So it is entirely fitting that the Song of Songs, which is full of extravagant poetic description, uses garden and water imagery to depict the intimacy and vibrancy of marital love.

Dear lover and friend,
you're a secret garden,
a private and pure fountain.
Body and soul, you are paradise, . . .
A garden fountain, sparkling and splashing,
fed by spring waters from the Lebanon mountains.
Song of Songs 4:12-15 MSG


In the exotic language of this song, this is an extended metaphor of sexual intimacy.

Drip, Drip, Drip

That’s not the sound of early morning coffee, it’s the slow eroding of a marriage.

There’s lots of ways to wreck a marriage - infidelity, booze, sloth and indifference are a few of the standard poisons, but the Book of Proverbs has a choice little evocative analogy for another form of domestic vice guaranteed to breed discontent - 'a quarrelsome spouse is like a constant dripping on a rainy day' Proverbs 27:15.

Three Things that Amaze – No, Make that Four!

Near the end of a book written to teach us wisdom, comes a portrait of four things that can leave you in awe. Proverbs 30:18-19 says,

There are three things that amaze me—

no, four things that I don’t understand:

how an eagle glides through the sky,

how a snake slithers on a rock,

how a ship navigates the ocean,

how a man loves a woman.

Polluted Well

Keeping water clean takes a lot of vigilance.

Proverbs 25:26 says, “like a muddied spring or a polluted well are the righteous who give way to the wicked.”

Everybody using a spring or a well depends on the purity of the source. If a well-shaft is not kept secure things will fall into the well and pollute the water. If animals foul the ground around a spring, or if industries drain toxins into the ground nearby, the aquifer can be compromised and the water made undrinkable.

In the same way, a leader who accepts a bribe destroys trust and fouls the credibility of the workplace. An inspector who looks the other way, instead of being true to her duties, undermines the system she was hired to protect.

The Secret Power of Spring Rain

Okay, the calendar may say Spring, but Nature has a mind of its own and treated us overnight to a cruel dump of wet, unwelcome snow.

Yesterday I took pictures of crocus shoots triumphantly announcing the new season. Today they’re buried in white.

Having endured 5 months of winter, I’m not about to let a spring blizzard get me down. I know what’s coming. I’m Canadian. I’m a man of hope. Still, I’m tired of winter and itching to get my hands dirty in the soil again, to participate in the annual miracle.

In the land of the Bible, the spring rains are vital for bringing the winter growing season to its climax. The ‘early rain’ falls in late October and softens the summer-hardened soil for planting. January brings the peak rainfall, but most vital is the spring rain, also called ‘the latter rain’, just ahead of the heat that plumps the harvest. No rains, no harvest.

Water Into Fine Wine

I spent the week-end cleaning old wine bottles in preparation for filling them this week.

Water is a great cleaning agent, but it has even nobler roles in the world of wine.

For Better or Worse . . .
It was a wedding host’s worst nightmare - and a bad omen for the marriage. At mid-point in the reception, the wine ran out. The celebration sagged and the guests would soon start leaving. It smacked of bad planning, embarrassing poverty or, worse, shabby hospitality.

Enter the mystery guest. Without fanfare, almost before anyone knew what had happened, Jesus replenished the depleted store of wine, and the party continued.


Water, Love and Marriage

This third post on Water, Love and Marriage is a strange but beautiful picture of a bride getting cleaned up for her wedding – and surprisingly, it’s the bridegroom himself, at enormous personal cost and sacrifice, who bathes her and dresses her in dazzling silk.

Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word. . . so she might be unstained, without wrinkle or any other blemish.   Ephesians 5:25-27

My good friend Glenn Smith in Montreal, says that Canadians have a hard time grasping this vibrant water metaphor. Canada has an abundance of water - 7 percent of the world's renewable supply of freshwater and 20 percent of Earth’s frozen freshwater locked in glaciers and the polar ice cap.

Dance With the One Who Brung Ya

In keeping with my Water and Marriage theme of the week – my anniversary being tomorrow, it’s not just Shania Twain who sings about staying with the one who brought her to the dance.

The ancient wisdom of Israel also recognized the folly of infidelity. (Proverbs 5:15-17)

Drink water from your own cistern,

running water from your own well.

Should your springs overflow in the streets,

your streams of water in the public squares?

Let them be yours alone,

never to be shared with strangers.

This proverb knows how enticing forbidden love can be; it urges us to guard our hearts and marriage, to resist the beguiling call to squander our sexual energies with strangers. Seeking intimacy outside your marriage is sure to ruin the dance, foul the well or rot the staves of your rain-barrel.

Many Waters Cannot Quench Love

Four years ago this week . . . Tiffany and I exchanged vows of marriage, vows of life-long devotion to each other.

Our ceremony included these words about water and love from Song of Solomon 8:7:

Many waters cannot quench love;

Neither can floods drown it.

Lots of water has streamed under our bridge since then, but it has not quenched the joy or love in our hearts.

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.

Thirsty No More

Guest contributor - Grace Jacobson


Sometimes you meet the strangest people at the water-cooler.

I’d never seen him before. We could have been any two thirsty people coming for a drink. How could he have known that behind my mask I was forever searching for love in all the wrong places?

Five times my dowry returned, I’d forgotten who I really am. I’d giving up the formalities and even worse, the hope of every finding my true love – or my true self. I came at noon to avoid the whispers of the gossips.

I could see right away that he was a Jew and I braced for the sting of his slur. But he merely asked for a drink. “What, no racist epithet?” I asked.

But he simply said that God is generous and if I knew who was talking to me and asked him for a drink, he’d be more than willing to give me a drink. I stared at him.