I Don’t Know Where The Streams Are

One warm Monday evening, I found myself with half an hour to fill as I waited for one of my children to have a music lesson. Across the street was a new greenway, quietly inviting me to spend the time strolling instead of scrolling. The path passed along roads I’d travelled many times in the car, so I didn’t expect to see anything new, just to stretch my legs. I was wrong.

Things look different when you’re walking. You have time to notice the individual wildflowers, and the meadow behind the wall with the horses in it that you just couldn’t see from the driver’s seat of the car. The discovery that surprised me most, though, was the stream running right beside the road. Through the crowded trees and bushes it babbles away constantly as it splashes its way over rocks and under roots and how did I travel this road so many times and never even know this was here?

I never saw it. I never heard it, laughing. My convenient car lifted me off the ground and protected me from the elements, gave me incredible freedom of movement—and robbed me of experiencing the natural wonders that were literally right beside me. Fresh water is not just a natural beauty. It’s essential to life. Not so long ago, everyone needed to know exactly where the local fresh water sources were. And we still depend, just as much as anyone ever did, on fresh water. The difference for me is only that someone laid pipes and built machines that can take water from its sources and send it directly to the taps in my house. I don’t need to know where the streams are anymore, the streams now come to me. I don’t need to think about them. I can safely take fresh water for granted.

Or can I?

It may be safe for my body to take the water I depend on for granted, but forgetting my dependence is never safe for my soul. If I let it, my modern plumbing could leak a lie into my mind—it could subtly assure me that I can get everything I need by human means, and human power. And while humans have been very clever about cleaning and re-routing my drinking water—and I’m very thankful for their efforts—that doesn’t change the fact that the one who invented water in the first place is God. However it gets to me, the water in the tap is his. Ultimately, my life is not sustained by human ingenuity. It is sustained by the creative power and provision of the God who made the water cycle, who fills the air I fill my lungs with, who causes my food to grow through the seasons. I don’t need to know which streams I drink from anymore, but I do need to remember who sustains my life. It is not me. It is not my plumber. It is my Lord.

“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind.”

– Job 12:7-10