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.