That Kid Reminds Me of Someone

Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 1

“Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.”

     —1 Tim. 4:12 niv

I had a mild culture-shock one Christmas night as a teenager, staying up into the wee hours of December 26^th.  WASH-FM, our local soft-rock station in D.C., had been playing an all-Christmas format for weeks and weeks.  That night, as the calendar turned over to the day after, they were right back playing their usual Phil Collins and Shania Twain as though the preceding four weeks of Advent had been merely a peppermint-coated dream.

That’s how the radio business works, I suppose: and I do like Phil Collins as much as the next guy, so I’m not lamenting the choice of music.  But it seems to me that we’ve gotten Christmas backward.  Our culture tends to equate Advent, designed to be a season of looking-ahead, with Christmas itself, such that December 25 is a single, climactic day to cap off and terminate a season, rather than the kickstart it actually is—the jumping-off point for a twelve-day festival that we’ve almost completely forgotten.

It might not be such a big deal, except that there are implications here for the way the church interacts with teenagers.  Advent, recall, is a time of looking forward to God being born as a human baby, somehow both fully God and fully diapered at the same time (technically, “wrapped in bands of cloth”, Luke 2:12): and then for the next twelve days from December 25^th to January 5^th, the season of Christmastide invites us to stop in awe and praise God that it has actually happened—that God was among us as an actual kid.

But if we move on too quickly, if we fail to do like Mary who “treasured all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51)—taking it all in, pondering, enjoying it—we might fail to make a crucial connection: that if God became a human teenager, the teens around us are exactly like God just as they are.  Leave Christmas too fast, and we might miss it—and we may not realize how holy, how God-reflecting, how amazing these under-18ers are just by virtue of being themselves.

Instead, let’s make some deliberate effort this Christmastide to celebrate for the entire 12 days, even if in small ways, praising the Lord for affirming our kids by becoming one of them.  Once Epiphany comes, from January 6^th onward, we may then be able to ride the wave of celebrating “the child” that the magi visited (note that it’s not “the baby” anymore in Matt. 2:11), and then the young-person Jesus who “increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52)—just like the junior- and senior-highs around us are already doing.

These youth bear Jesus’ image through simply being themselves, without even trying.  This January, let’s stop and be in awe of how awesome that is—and how powerfully our young people reflect the image of the Living God just by being alive.

This article appears in the January, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash.  Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.

Grace, Next Exit

“Morning by morning new mercies I see.”

          —Chisholm, “Great is Thy Faithfulness” 

KIRKLAND, Wash., Nov. 28

It’s fitting that when my car was rear-ended Thanksgiving afternoon, there was a rainbow over Interstate 5.  It was a symbol of God’s promise, God’s power.

In 1863, President Lincoln asked us to “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”  This Thanksgiving, I’m reminded of God’s intense goodness, the small mercies that may not be so small at all, and his promises—to protect his people, to watch over us for good, and to be with us in the storms of life.

I’ve walked away from an accident with my sense of humor intact, and early returns say I’m healthy, if a tiny bit sore.  It could have been much worse.

The car is probably totaled, says Bill the Tow Truck Guy.  The airbags deployed, the windshield was cracked beyond any further usefulness, the hood was damaged.  For a 2001 model-year car, it’s about all I could have hoped for.  But I myself walked away.

Actually, the car itself was a testimony to God’s providence from the start.  I never asked for that car.

A few years ago, I was working part-time as a youth director, commuting 90 minutes via three King County buses each way to work.  I’ve always been fascinated by public transit, so I didn’t mind.  But after a year there, a co-leader in the youth program told me he was going to procure a car—free of charge to me—so that I could spend time with the youth without having the burden of transit.  Almost before I could object that interns don’t usually get cars, it was sitting in front of my apartment.  The church even paid the insurance.

I’ve continued to be thankful to that family for letting me borrow the car (they later allowed me to purchase it from them at a very hospitable discount) and for the road trips and ministry moments that God enabled through it.  That little Corolla, ten years old and only 78,349 miles on the odometer when I first drove it, took me north to Kelowna, B.C., east to Idaho, south to Tigard, Ore., and west to the Pacific before it finally met its end.

And not only was the car a miracle of providence: it was, in fact, safe to drive; that’s not always a given right now.  A few weeks ago, when all those old-model Corollas were being recalled because of airbag shrapnel, I checked online to see if my 2001 model was at risk.  The oldest models in jeopardy: 2002.  And yesterday, I walked away from an airbag deployment shrapnel-free: all praise to a very faithful God.

I know I have to resist the temptation to equate “I survived an accident” with “I must therefore be more highly valuable to God than most.”  That doesn’t hold.  Lots of the heroes of the faith died untimely.  Jim Elliot was one.  So were St. Peter and most of the disciples.  So did Dr. King.  And faithful servants of the Lord are killed by accident every day—Rich Mullins died in a car accident—or as martyrs, or for reasons we know not why.

Nor is mine the most important story this week.  This was, after all, the week of the Ferguson verdict, and the nation is reeling in its aftermath.  A single accident on a Washington State freeway doesn’t deserve the attention due the important conversations around race, justice, and truth that we urgently need to have.

But even so, in this season of giving thanks, I’m walking free from a wreck: and I marvel at the providence of a God who reminds me that he is in control, that he watches over, that he provides every need.

The time may come when I don’t survive an accident, or when I am seriously injured.  In that case, I’ll be able to say “Thank you, Lord” for walking with me through the grief, pain, and “why?” that will come after.  Or maybe I’ll be in a position to say “Thank you, Lord” for salvation and the start of eternal life in God’s presence.  Not every accident will be survived.  But today, I’ll say thanks to God for the ones that are.

“When the bow is in the clouds,” said God after the flood, “I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth” (Gen. 9:16).  The Lord promised we’d never again see the world destroyed by flood.  It still hasn’t been.  And that freeway-rainbow yesterday over a Pierce County accident scene reminds me of just how deep God’s faithfulness goes.

God's City: Far-Off but Very Real

PORT ORCHARD, Wash., Sept. 28

From a café-patio in this seaside town in Kitsap County, there’s an object-lesson in being able to see a place without being able to get there without considerable effort.  From where I write just now, at a coffee shop on the town’s northwestern waterfront, I can see across to the Bremerton shipyards and the Seattle-bound ferry staging to leave on its one-hour journey to the Emerald City.

But even though I can see Bremerton from here, to get there would take some doing.  The seagulls can fly a mile or so and arrive at the sunlit shipyards across Sinclair Inlet, and there’s a pedestrian ferry nearby—but it’s ten miles around by car.

That may not seem like much, so consider this: from the other coast of the town’s peninsula, such as the house where I lodged in the South Colby neighborhood last night, one can see all the way across to Seattle.  But this presents an even larger conundrum.  Seattle is only about 10 miles away in a straight line.  But to get there, you must either take a Washington State Ferry (the most direct route is via the Southworth–Fauntleroy ferry, for a door-to-door trip of about 15 miles and an added toll) or labor through Tacoma and I-5 traffic, which also requires a toll on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, for a total of 65 miles.  Either way, it’s often either a whole lot of traffic or a whole lot of money, so it’s good to keep your plans flexible with whomever you’re meeting on the other end.

It’s an adventure in being so close and yet so far, of seeing a destination but being unable to get there just yet.  The Scriptures are full of imagery of something grand, something extremely good just on the horizon—a new heaven and a new earth, the New Jerusalem.  At least one of our forebears even caught glimpses of what’s coming.  We may not know for sure just what John of Patmos was trying his hardest to describe in Revelation—the strange creatures, trumpets, and all the other weird imagery—but what he was able to see was that there’s no more sorrow or death, and there’s a new city with God as king, it’s on an actual planet earth (not in the clouds), and it’s where the party’s at (see Rev. 21:1–4).

From here in Port Orchard—a pleasant town in itself—you can see a city: but you can’t reach it.  Yet.  You have to travel a bit first, and it’s a long way around.

That’s how it is for us, too, on the shore of a fallen world which has started to be remade, but which isn’t quite yet reborn into the place God intends: a new earth, an earth without injustice, sorrow, oppression, starvation, or any of the other darknesses that plague us and cause untold suffering and misery.  Sometimes churchpeople talk about “the already-but-not-yet”: the very presence of Jesus as God-in-the-flesh, walking as God on our planet, means that the restored, justice-filled, liberated kingdom of God has already started to come among us even now.

But it’s not completely here.  The rich continue to spend opulently while the masses die of preventable diseases.  Oppression is still around.  Ferguson still happens.  Ebola outbreaks still happen.  Kids continue to die of malaria.  Entire people-groups continue to be disenfranchised.  If there’s a new city coming, it’s not here yet, and we have a ton of work cut out for us to build it.

But we can glimpse it; we might even hear from people who have glimpsed it and came back on the ferry, so to speak: people like John of Patmos, or modern-day visionaries like Dr. King.  But the best we can do, from this vantage on the shore, is to ask the Lord for direction and take the first steps in boldness, justice, and love, and thereby move, at God’s invitation and in God’s power alone, one step at a time closer on the road to a restored Jerusalem, the city that we can see in the distance, and which will get closer with every act of love in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The analogy to Port Orchard is imperfect, of course, in that I’ve found it to be very pleasant, populated with kind people, full of stunning scenery.  In a way, I feel strange comparing the town to a fallen world—and I hope my readers from there will understand my intention with the metaphor.

Because it’s still a helpful one.  From the Kitsap County side of Puget Sound, it would be just as erroneous to say that there is no Seattle as it would be to say that I am already there.  The same is true with the world: the Scriptures tell us that there is hope for a better, restored order of things.  It’s just not finished being remade yet.  But given enough time, and enough trust in the God who is ready to show us the way, it will be.

Shawshank: Still a Beacon at 20

Note:  This article contains spoilers.

“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about,” says Red (Morgan Freeman) as a Mozart aria soothes the hard-bitten Shawshank State Prison world with sopranic caress.  “I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it.”

Many of our hearts have ached when we’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption, which was released in the U.S. twenty years ago today.  We sympathize with its sense of despair, resonating with the intensity of the injustice dealt to Andy Dufresne, the perfect storm of circumstance and betrayal that lands him at Shawshank, or the years of long-suffering it finally takes him to break free.

Or we might identify with the film’s powerful images of hope amid that same darkness.  Maybe it’s Andy playing music over the P.A. system, or maybe it’s him emerging from solitary confinement two weeks later, smiling (“I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company . . . . That’s the beauty of music: they can’t get that from you”).  Maybe it’s Red daring to play a few quiet notes on the harmonica that Andy gives him, a flicker of music, smaller but no less real, in the dark night of the cell block and the soul.  Or maybe it’s the film’s climactic moment of release—Andy, spilling from the sewer pipe, standing tall in the rain, hands spread aloft in freedom.

Somewhere, deep in our culture’s collective spirit, The Shawshank Redemption touches a wound that needs the power of its comfort.  We need to walk through the hell of Andy’s imprisonment for an hour and 59 minutes and 36 seconds—a cinematic eternity—before we get to see him splash into liberation, because that’s what living in a fallen, unjust, broken world is like sometimes: long seasons of “How long, O Lord?”, seasons of rights trampled, of families broken, of personhood betrayed by impersonal systems.  Andy spends two decades in prison; God the Son spends two nights in death.

But it doesn't stop there, because the lamentation does end, the stone does roll away, Andy does pour forth from 500 yards of pipe—and we know it’s all right, there’s a joyful ending coming, it wasn't all for naught, and he’s going to be okay.  As the viewers, we are with him: through the trial and false conviction, through the first years of adjustment and abuse at Shawshank, through the grueling passage of time that, as Red says, “can draw out like a blade,” through the murder of his adopted son and protégé.  We have to know he’ll be all right, we have to know that we’ll be all right: that the broken world of Shawshank is not all that there is.  We and our whole world will be, must be, shall be, redeemed: we will, like Andy, tumble from the pipe into the wall-less, oppression-less freedom of the cosmos as God created it to be.

As it happens, the film itself bears witness to the same message of delayed hope that it sought to tell.  “It got good reviews” when it opened, writes Roger Ebert in The Great Movies, “but did poor business.  Its $18-million original gross didn’t cover costs; it took in only another $10 million after winning seven Oscar nominations.”  Shawshank didn’t win a single one.

Instead, the film caught on after its run had finished.  “In one of the most remarkable stories in the history of home video,” writes Ebert, “it found its real mass audience on tapes and discs and through TV screenings.”  By 1999, he says, the film was topping the IMDb top-250 of users’ favorites.  Fifteen years later, it’s still at number one.

That’s not bad for a movie whose name itself was hard for its audience to remember.  In interviews, actors would joke about fans complimenting them on “Shinkshank Reduction”, for example, or “Scrimshaw Rejection”.  But then, the very anonymity of the film, and its attendant success over the years, runs parallel to Red’s initial perception of the protagonist: it “looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over.”

We’ll recognize the same phenomenon from our life as Christians.  Jesus the Messiah “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, / nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2).  Andy, the man who enters the prison identified as “that tall drink of water,” the movie that fails to win any of the Academy Awards for which it’s nominated: the savior who is crucified by the Romans.  All this must come to pass—“and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14).  An hour and fifty-nine cinematic minutes of life must come, yes, but there will be redemption: injustice will be reconciled, sin will be done away with, “mourning and crying and pain will be no more, / for the first things have passed away” (Rev.21:4).  Jesus himself will be victorious.  Our hope, as Edward Mote wrote in 1834, “is built on nothing less.”

“I tell you, those voices soared,” says Red, as Andy plays Mozart into the yard. “It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away.  And for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.”  In a cinematic landscape often as forlorn as the culture in which it resides, here’s thanks to God that Shawshank has stood these twenty years as the pillar it deserves to be, and for the beacon of profound, victorious hope that our Lord is and toward whom, deliberately or not, the film hints our attention.

Sources as named, and:

           

“Hope Springs Eternal: A Look Back at The Shawshank Redemption,” directed by Constantine Nasr (Castle Rock Films / Warner Bros., 2004); featurette on The Shawshank Redemption, 10^th anniv. special ed. (2 DVDs), directed by Frank Darabont, disc 2.

“Shawshank: The Redeeming Feature,” written by Mark Kermode, directed by Andrew Abbott (Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2001), featurette on The Shawshank Redemption, 10^th anniv. special ed. (2 DVDs), directed by Frank Darabont, disc 2.

Special thanks to the Collins Memorial Library at the University of Puget Sound.

Doughnuts and Passionate Living

PORTLAND, Ore., Sept. 6

Doughnuts are an important part of a trip to Portland, and they can also tell us something about human creativity as a reflection of God’s love.

Voodoo Doughnuts, known throughout the Northwest for the tasty and eccentric confections it makes, had a line 39 persons deep this afternoon when I arrived to buy a dozen, and that’s only counting the persons outside the lobby, wrapping down SW 3^rd Ave.  I queued for about 20 minutes this time, which, according to a nearby restaurant hostess who recognized the signature pink doughnut-box, is less than it could have been.

What draws so many people?  Doughnuts, doughnuts and more doughnuts, in virtually every shape and color imaginable: doughnuts with Froot Loops or Cap’n Crunch on them; the Bacon Maple Bar (yes, a maple bar with bacon on top); doughnuts with grape dust; the Oreo-crumbled “Dirt” doughnut; even the mysterious, Rice Krispied and peanut buttered “No Name” doughnut.  You name it, they’ve probably got it, or something very close.

Sure, doughnuts are nothing new, and no, they don’t require a 300-mile round-trip to obtain.  The Safeway and Fred Meyer stores near my home will carry doughnuts, which, at a cost of $3.75 a gallon for gas to and from Portland, would probably be a cheaper alternative when I get a hankering for some dessert, even if the bacon-maple bar is worth what you pay for it.  (It is.)

But there’s something about the way Voodoo approaches the art of doughnut-making that is inspiring for the unorthodox nature of it.  Dunkin' Donuts will sell a decent jelly-doughnut with white powder, and Krispy Kreme lets you know when the cakes are hot.  But Voodoo puts fun into it, taking an old idea—fried cake batter with frosting—and dishing it out with a layer of artistry (the chandeliers, stained glass, and glittered bricks in the facility, plus the doughnuts themselves), a tongue-in-cheek, stylized sense of humor (the four-foot wood coffin loaded with 36 doughnuts available for sale), and social conscience (the company supports a list of organizations).

It’s classic Portland.  The local spirit of “Keep Portland Weird”—the city’s famous slogan, painted in all caps on a building across the street—is in full bloom at Voodoo.  Or perhaps it’s classic Northwest: the Westside’s pioneer-rooted fascination with putting new spins on old ideas, of challenging what’s accepted, of living life for the pure fun and adventure of living life.  It’s reflected in every doughnut here.

Couldn’t we church-people take a lesson from something as creative as the Tangfastic Doughnut (vanilla icing, Tang powder, marshmallows), served up with love to a waiting public?  What if we allowed ourselves to be as geeky, as adventurous, as creative with our own passions and gifts as the people at Voodoo have been in making their battered-and-fried creations?

Look at the way the Psalmist can’t contain her or his explosive worshipfulness in Psalm 66.  “Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth” (66:1), or maybe sing something (66:2), or say something (66:3), or tell some kind of story about God’s deeds (66:5), or give some kind of gift (66:13, 15), or just explode in a yell (66:17)—anything, just do something!  Let it out.  Paint something.  Make something with Popsicle sticks and Legos.  Jam on your guitar.  Write a social-justice manifesto.  Dance.

What do you need to let it out?  Maybe your creativity isn’t from being a doughnut-maker, but maybe you have some other form of passion, some other “place of geek” in your spirit, that you can give to God in praise and worship.  Are you an artist?  Do art for God’s glory.  Are you a biologist?  Do biology as worship to the Lord.  Are you a science fiction writer?  Then write the next Star Trek series for the glory of the Lord.  Are you a sportsperson?  A graphic designer?  A dentist?  A student?  A compassion-giver?  “Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17 niv).  Live life.  Let your geek out.  Set someone free.  Do something new.

“What will your verse be?” asks Apple’s new iPad TV ads, invoking Walt Whitman’s immortal “O Me!  O Life!”  “The powerful play goes on,” he wrote, “and you may contribute a verse.”  Voodoo isn’t a faith-based organization, but they incidentally teach a lesson to those of us that are, we who also want to see a broken world restored, and justice and peace for all people.  The lesson, it seems to me, is this: take an idea, something you know how to do, and do it with joy, with passion, and an eye to the community.  That’s all it takes to have 39 people lined up outside to experience the results of that passion, to ask what all the fuss is about, to go out of their way for a taste of something better, something out of the ordinary—a little taste of what the world could be.  May you learn how to contribute your verse, indulging in God’s creativity by letting yourself be yourself, or maybe just by making a doughnut.

Author’s note: as this is a personal blog of my own reflections and travels, Voodoo Doughnuts has not endorsed this article or my reflections or conclusions.  Also, for the record, the author does not endorse the practice of voodoo itself, nor any particular products or services at Voodoo (fair warning: some of the products may not be family-friendly)—just their awesome sense of creativity.

Quotation from The Complete Walt Whitman: The Collected Works (Bybliotech [via Google Books], 2014), accessed September 6, 2014, no pagination.

Texting, Driving, and the Innocents

If you pay less than $4.3 million for your phone plan, you’re more fortunate than a Florida man whose texting-and-driving lost him a lawsuit this month.

His then-girlfriend was a passenger in 2010 when his texting led him to run a stop sign and crash into a truck, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the A.P.  The girlfriend sued, and a judge ruled in her favor this month to the tune of seven figures.  Her lawyers say she still uses a wheelchair and has brain damage.  The fact that it could happen to any of us should be argument enough to put our phones away when we get behind the wheel.

Plus, that’s a lot of money.  On Interstate 90, a line of 4.3 million one-dollar bills would stretch from Seattle to about 100 miles past Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which at 60 miles per hour would take over 6 ½ hours to drive from end to end.  4.3 million seconds from now, it will be October.

There was another major factor in the case, too: neither the driver nor the passenger were wearing seat belts.  But the weight of the case seems to have centered around the driver’s decision to text.

He and his passenger are lucky to be alive, and not just because of the seat belts.  According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, an average of about nine people died every day in 2012 from distraction-related accidents, and an estimated 1,150 people each day (average) were injured.  In Boise, a mother who was partially paralyzed in 2010 after texting “I love you” from behind the wheel is now part of a campaign to persuade drivers to stop typing in motion.

For my own part, I do text.  The earliest message I clearly remember sending was the code “ISP” in early 2007—back before the medium had emerged as the go-to it is today—to signal my father that my plane had landed at Islip, N.Y.  That was then, when texting was still a novelty.  By late 2012, Americans were sending 6 billion text messages every day in the U.S. alone, according to CTIA, a Washington, D.C.,-based lobbying and wireless trade group.  That’s over 69,000 every second.  Why shouldn’t a medium this simple, this ubiquitous, this useful, tempt us when we’re behind the wheel?

State governments have noticed the temptation.  Washington State, for example, can charge $124 for an infraction, and Oregon can fine up to $500.  In Alaska, drivers can be fined up to $10,000 for texting while driving, and up to $50,000 if someone is injured.  Good.  We need more deterrence, not less.

It’s encouraging to see the rumblings of regulatory and grassroots work to help to curb the problem.  A video by WJBF in Augusta, Ga., shows two drivers, one of whom has crossed the center line while texting.  Time freezes a split second before the collision is to take place, and the non-texting driver pleads for the lives of her two children in the backseat.  It’s “supposed to be a quick text,” the other driver replies.  “I’m so sorry.”  The cars ram into each other head-on.  End of commercial.  The ad went viral.

I've been convicted by the video, and by the practice, as I’ve puttered around the Sound in my Corolla over the last week or two.  I’ve caught myself doing all manner of absent-minded things behind the wheel, like talking to a friend and almost having an accident, or impulsively checking the caller ID in peak-hour traffic, or checking my call-log.  Apparently the idea of how much damage a car can do at 60 miles per hour hasn’t quite gotten through my head.

Nor through our culture’s, judging by the number of times we do this every year.  A $4.3 million ruling should be a wake-up call for us, as should the fact of how many livelihoods we’re willing to risk by typing on the road—the children, mothers, doctors, humanitarians, big brothers and sisters, friends, lovers, fiancées, janitors, mentors, and all the rest, all made in the image of God.

Texting itself can be a powerful tool for good.  It can ease communication and help cement a society together, and that's often the way it works.  But texting behind the wheel isn't just a bad idea.  It's a reckless, senseless endangerment of people for whom Jesus died and rose again, and it needs to stop.

     Special thanks to Nick Harrell for help with research, and to Kiona Hampton for posting the WJBF video, which inspired this post.

No Water? No Problem

EPHRATA, Wash., August 17

Water is scarce in this part of the world if you don’t know where to find it and how to use it.  Maybe God did that on purpose.

Today’s Old Testament lesson from Genesis 45 is the story of how God used an exchange of grace in an otherwise dysfunctional family—the family of Jacob, “Israel” himself—to deliver an entire population from the effects of a drought so bad, it spanned seven years and bled from Egypt into Canaan.  Like drought-ridden Egypt in those days, this barren-yet-fertile part of Washington is a lesson in stewardship, planning, and knowing your limits.

Ephrata was known to early white settlers as “Indian Graves”.  Why “graves”?  Perhaps for how desolate the landscape would have looked in those days before high-tech irrigation.  Now, Ephrata is the seat of what's reputed to be the most potato-producing county in the U.S., a county blanketed with fertile agricultural land in spite of the dry conditions.

Grand Coulee Dam.

Photo copyright © Charles Harrell 2014.  Used by permission.

How is that possible?  Three words: Grand Coulee Dam, the famous and imposing structure on the Columbia River 60 miles north of here.  As one of a series of dams in the region, Grand Coulee can irrigate about 670,000 acres by itself, or a farm slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island.  Thanks to the work of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (a significant presence here in Ephrata), the water level is regulated throughout the year to provide enough water for farms, along with a lot of the hydro-electricity that keeps our espresso machines whistling in the Northwest.

Ephrata, being populated by farm-folk and federal workers, bears a slight resemblance to my old hometown of Lusby, Maryland, which is in tobacco country but also has its local share of Navy and government folks.  But unlike southern Maryland, which has three major bodies of water (the Patuxent and Potomac Rivers and the Chesapeake Bay) to Ephrata’s one (the Columbia), Ephrata can’t just count on rain or haul a bucket in from the river anytime it wants to.  The Columbia is in a gorge.  Much of Grant County, Washington, is on a plateau.

When I first moved to central Washington two years ago, I was astounded at how fast a person can get dehydrated.  In the mid-Atlantic, your sweat is a giveaway because the humidity prevents it from leaving your skin.  After you take a shower in the summer, you might as well take another shower.

Here, Mother Nature will phaser-vaporize the water right out of you before you know it, and you can get dehydrated without noticing your own perspiration.  But thanks to the Reclamation people, and their careful stewardship of water at the dam, a place whose aridity once made it an agricultural wasteland is now alive with the miles and miles of farms and the zing of hydroelectric power, a living, fertile landscape.

Life with Jesus has its dry seasons.  The Hebrews had their songs of “ascents” for the long, arduous climb up the hills into Jerusalem a few times a year, some of which survive today in the back pages of the book of Psalms.  And Jesus himself warned us about what can happen to the “seed” of the word of God when it’s not properly planted: “the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away” (Matt. 13:6; see Luke 8:11).  Were it not for deliberate irrigation, this town, which a sandwich-shop local tells me is full of hidden gems and is a nice place to grow up in, would probably cease to exist for the 7,900 people who live here.

But it all starts with regulating the water on the Columbia—the dam retains 400 billion cubic feet of it, enough to cover most of New England in a three-inch puddle—so that when the dry seasons come, there will be water to spare and the potatoes can keep growing.

The same is true in life with Christ.  Who are the people “pouring” God’s love into you, the relationships with family and friends that you’re cultivating, such that when the dry season comes, you’ll be able to survive?  What are the skills of spiritual discipline that today you can “stock up on”—make part of your daily routine with the Lord—so that you’ll have experience and Scripture-knowledge to draw on when the going gets tough?  What will be your song of ascents?

In my life, the Lord has sometimes given me “streams in the desert” (Isa. 35:6), helping me through the hard times of spiritual drought that are simply a part of life.  But the providence has usually come through God’s having prepared me beforehand, in the times that I felt the most at rest.  Ephrata wouldn’t be the bread basket it is today without careful planning and the water-stewardship that has taken place over the last century.  Jesus offers us living water in his very self.  Let’s soak up as much as we can.

All Scripture is nrsv unless noted.  This post was edited from Puyallup on August 17.