For more than half of my life, I have lived where water must be conserved. For many years it was a life and death issue because if the well ran dry, there was simply no alternative.
Now, of course, you can buy drinking water from a shop but where I live, water is still heavily guarded in dry times.
Most of the water-saving measures you hear about merely touch the surface of household waste but my practices are really tough. No drop escapes.
We are in dry times and run-off from the hot tap is meticulously collected for the electric kettle or to rinse vegetables. The dishwasher is completely off limits and all washing up must be done by hand in as little water as possible. The washing machine is only for real dirt, not for anything that can be rinsed off by hand in a bucket; and so on and on.
Saving water is urgent business just now and it seems that the media is talking about a worldwide shortage of water. It seems there is a famine for water almost everywhere and we can’t imagine anything much worse than a world’s running out of drinking water.
But God sees something far worse. “’The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.’” Amos 8:11.
Jesus has given us the remedy. He said “whoever drinks of the water I will give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”” John 4:14.
Jesus begs us to become one of God’s wells to quench a lethal thirst. Will you?
Elizabeth Price