Water in the Desert

I'm incredibly fascinated by water in the desert. I grew up in a place with lots of water--rivers and ponds and spring rains that almost always caused flooding. My grandfather took us to play in caves; until I moved to Arizona, I never thought about dry caves. I think I knew they existed, but wet caves carved by water are the ones I know well. Crawling around in them always meant lots of mud and dripping and riding home sitting on plastic bags.

There's little drinking water most of the time in the Sonoran desert. Hiking means carrying plenty of water with you. Businesses all keep bottled water and hand it out freely. Here, even if you do absolutely nothing that causes you to sweat, it's recommended that people drink half their body weight in ounces each day. Yeah, that's a lot of water. 

Despite the fact that most all of our water is piped in and carefully managed, there are fountains all over the Phoenix area. They're in front of churches, movie theaters, open air malls and housing complexes. My church has one, too, beside the outdoor baptistry. The gurgling of the fountains always turns my head. It's such an unnatural sound here. Water is something noticed and not quite so easily taken for granted.

I think it's that way even for people who have lived here a long time.

On my morning drive today, as I neared the freeway, I noticed bottles of water setting on the median. People often stand near that spot and ask for food or money from the drivers of the cars stuck at the stoplight. It's my assumption that one of the people who regularly passes through there left them for the person who will appear later in the day. Of course, maybe one of those beggars left them for someone else. 

I'm constantly amazed, in this land of clean, readily available drinking water, that the desert brings out the need for water so fully. Echoes from the Bible always enter my mind: the Hebrews who needed Moses to strike a rock for miraculous water because water was that scarce; the words of prophets marveling at God's abundance, like water in the desert; Jesus standing with a woman at a well, talking about water. Here, no one has to tell us how much we need water. Thirst does that all on its own.

As I ponder the life of the Church, as so many ponder the life of the Church with me, and wonder how to communicate the relevance we know we have for the future, it might just be so simple: there is water that you can drink and never be thirsty again.