When the poor and needy seek water,
and there is none,and their tongue is parched with thirst,
I the Lord will answer them,
I the God of Israel will not forsake them.
18 I will open rivers on the bare heights
and fountains in the midst of the valleys;
I will make the wilderness a pool of water
and the dry land springs of water.
19
Isaiah 41: 17- 18 NRSVue
There was considerable concern that the lack of snow this winter would mean limited Spring run-off. This affects river and lake levels and poses a problem for farmers. Thankfully, the last couple of weeks has brought a lot of rain in our part of Southern Ontario with a positive effect on waterways. There are creeks and other tributaries, marshes and swamps that are looking healthy in terms of water levels.
I've seen a few articles in the past couple of months about the buried urban streams of many towns and cities, part of the infrastructure ethos of another era to divert them through culverts and underground channels. The result has been issues of flooding as these conduits are unable to deal with the volume of water as we pave everything in sight and we dealing with more climate change super-charged storms. There was a media kerfuffle and right-wing wuffing about a "rain tax" in Toronto that was really a proposal to make property owners pay for practices contributing to run-off. Thanks to the outcry this has been scrapped.
Lost Rivers Map for Toronto
Efforts are underway in many communities to free these waterways to reduce flooding risk and to create environments that support fish and trees, butterflies and birds. There are people who are doing the work of rediscovering these waterways, either as personal projects or part of municipal plans to restore them as buffer zones. Havergall College. a hoighty toighty girls school in Toronto, has embarked on an impressive project to restore a stream and the riparian landscape on its property.
It got me thinking about the biblical praise for sources of water, so important in a land where there is no rain for months on end. When we were in Israel last year at this time the Spring rains had lingered and on hikes we were wading through raging streams that would dry up in Summer. Waterfalls along wadis were still in full force. Everything was green and in bloom but our family members assured us that this would change in a matter of weeks.
A nearby evangelical church here in Belleville also came to mind, It is called Desert Stream, an active congregation with a huge parking lot. I wonder if they know that there is stream adjacent to their property running through a culvert to Lake Ontario, only a few hundreds metres away? And what runs off that parking area into the lake?
This also got me pondering about what metaphorical "living waters' we need to bring to the surface in what often seem to be dried up mainline churches. How is Christ, Living Water, the source of abundance and refreshment -- dare I say revival?-- in such challenging times?
Ruth at Ein Gedi is the Judean Wilderness, Israel 2023
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