by Larry Magnuson
Everything is beautiful! The native grasses around our home are tall and green. There are wild flowers everywhere poking their heads up through the grasses. Our pond is full and draws animals down each evening for a drink. Everywhere you look there is growth and beauty. It hasn’t always been that way. Last year our landscape was brown and lifeless. The flowers were few and sickly. Our pond was empty and dry. Smoke and fire devastated the forests all across Colorado. Unfortunately that’s still true for much of western Colorado and states further West. The difference is water – fresh, wonderful, life-giving water! It is water that brings growth and life. There is even a fresh clean smell to the air after a summer rain. Water changes everything.
Last year I put some large old containers under my downspouts to collect rainwater from my roof. They hold about 100 gallons each. Trouble is one has a leak and even that 200 gallons is not nearly enough water for my gardens, little less our thirteen acres of wild flowers. Before I knew it, both containers were empty time after time.
Water is an illustration of spiritual life as well as natural life throughout the pages of Scripture. I came across this verse in Jeremiah 2:13.
My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken Me, the spring of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
How often do we create our own cisterns out of dreams, possessions, prestige, relationships, and countless other things? We deceive ourselves thinking these cisterns will hold water and make our lives meaningful and beautiful. Trouble is they are all broken, all of them. They don’t hold water because they leak. And notice it’s not the non-believers that are doing this. The verse begins with the words, “My people” – God’s people, that’s you and me. We are the ones who so often waste our time building broken cisterns in our lives.
The answer to life-giving water is not cisterns but time spent with the source of living water. It is God himself who brings the meaning, beauty, and growth that we all crave. So let’s put down our shovels and take some time in the coming week to sit at the feet of our Abba (daddy) Father who is the source of never-ending fresh, clean, clear, life-giving water.