Living Water

Yes, I do know that every thing and every place has its own type of beauty, but I have to admit that I’m not much impressed by the desert. I don’t care for places that look run down or worn out. I just don’t like things that look poor. And although not absolutely everything in and around this desert looks poor, most of it does.

As I was driving around, I tried to pinpoint why it looked so poor—in fact, why it is so poor—and I concluded it is because of water. How can you have prosperity without water? Moreover, I concluded that the reason I look at the desert and see poverty is because it isn’t green. I don’t think green equates to wealth just because that’s the color of the US dollar: green is the luxury of shade on a hot summer day; it is the abundance of food; it is a wealth of birds in the trees and wildlife in the brush. There is a reason so few live in the desert!

Israel demonstrated an interesting concept about the desert. They started in an area where the desert had been tamed, so to speak. In Egypt, there was one huge river, and there was desert, and they’d learned how to manually get water to the places they needed it to go. They’d made their lifestyle sustainable, you might say.

From there, the Lord took them out into an untamed desert. He tested and tried them, we’re told, and if there is one thing that deserts do, it is testing and trying us. In that desert, they had to depend on the Lord for everything, every day.

It was from that place that the Lord took them into true wealth. Presumably the overall clime of the middle east has changed since the days that Abraham walked through the land, because it was described as a green place of rivers and springs, rain and dew. Ah, how good that must have sounded after the desert! A place that God Himself tended.

I wonder if most of us live most of our lives in Egypt, that tamed desert. We pump muddy water from a muddy river, and convince ourselves that we’re really living. It’s only when the Lord takes us into the untamed desert, the real desert, that we realize that we’re hungry for something more. We want a land where springs of water flow of their own accord. We want rain and dew from heaven. We want running rivers. We see, then, that all our efforts in hand-pumping the Nile were not achieving the wealth that we really desired; our work was merely making us tired and wearing us out.

I want my life to be green. To be really, truly alive. I want to be wealthy in every way, not worn out and poor. There is only one way for me to have my desire: I’ve got to stay by the living water, every single day.

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