At the Scent of Water

One of the signs of global climate change is that many places in the world are becoming drier by the year, though not always a result of decisions as reckless as the Aral Sea (see last week's post). Climate change is taking its toll and desertification is encroaching on many communities around the world.

It’s not just happening in Africa, Australia and California. Climatologists and meteorologists in central Europe have said that the region is seeing more and more extreme weather including long periods of dry and hot weather in the summer, severe flooding and bitter winter weather.

Last January, a CzechGlobe report claimed that the Czech Republic had become one of the driest countries in Europe. The region is experiencing the effects of climate change in more frequent extreme weather events and changes in biodiversity. Half the Czech population relies on crucial underground water supplies, but these are drying up. With the drying of the landscape, drier periods get longer and are followed by bursts of intense rainfall which the dry soil cannot absorb, resulting in less recharge to the aquifers.

Governements are responding to do what they can to protect their water supplies. Sustained drought destroys life. As we noted in last week's post, the biblical wise man, Job, drew an analogy between the drying out of the land and human death.

Job has a knack for nailing the bleakest of prospects. Job observes that desertification doesn’t just happen in geography. It’s part of the human condition. He noted the brevity and frailty of human life – “We blossom like a flower and then wither. Like a passing shadow, we quickly disappear” (v.1-2). Then he adds,

"As water evaporates from a lake

and a river disappears in drought,

people are laid to rest

and do not rise again." Job 14:11-12

We’re like the wadis of Africa and the Middle East that run fast and full in flood time but quickly become parched and dry. We “breathe our last and are no more.”(Job 14:10). Job goes on at length to underscore the finality of death. 

Job laments this gloom that hangs over human life. He doesn’t want to just lay down and die. Like Dylan Thomas, he “rages against the dying of the light.” In his desperate quest for hope, Job grasps at a straw from biology, from botany.

“At least there is hope for a tree:

If it is cut down, it will sprout again,

and its new shoots will not fail.

Its roots may grow old in the ground

and its stump die in the soil,

yet at the scent of water it will bud

and put forth shoots like a plant. Job 14:7-9

There’s an earthiness about Job’s reasoning. Human beings are of the earth – why don’t natural laws apply to us? When a tree is felled, its roots don’t necessarily rot in the ground. Sometimes ‘at the scent of water’ they sprout again. Why can’t human beings revive like trees do and have another go at life?

I love Job’s steadfastness and the resilience of his faith. Job isn’t naïve or sentimental; he has unflinching courage and withering honesty; he eloquently expresses the anguish of his soul and the injustice of his suffering. Yet, in the face of his physical pain and spiritual bewilderment and the mystery of God’s silence, he maintains his trust in God. “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him” Job 13:15.

Job’s convictions do not shrivel in the heat; his faith does not evaporate despite the intensity of his suffering. His soul, though parched and dry, is sustained. Somehow the scent of water, hints of God’s reality, perhaps his earlier experience of God’s goodness and trustworthiness, kept him rooted and alive in drought.