Tag Archive | water

The Life Giving Lake

Oct11

This post is a part of the Five Minute Friday link up. We write for 5 minutes on a one-word prompt, without heavy editing, and see what happens. Today’s prompt is “deep.”

I walked to the edge of the lake and stuck my toes in the water. It was surprisingly warm. I figured it must be shallow because everyone knows that deep waters are cold. And mysterious. And dark.

So I began to walk further in, exploring, a little hesitant, not knowing exactly what I’d encountered, but figuring I had heard enough about this particular lake to have some idea of what I was getting myself into.

Boy was I wrong.

I knew nothing about this vast, unsearchable body of water. I didn’t know that it would beckon me to go deeper.

I didn’t know that it would encompass me, overwhelm me, yet buoy me and keep me safe.

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I didn’t know that I would never, ever be able to fathom its depths. That I would never know everything there was to know about it.

But I could see myself reflected in its depths.

And I would be drawn back to it time and time again. In fact, I would never want to leave. And I never had to. I could live there, in fact, I had to live there.

What I didn’t know is that life was in its depths. And after all, it wasn’t dark beneath the surface. It was surprisingly, amazingly, overwhelmingly, bright.

 

In Need of Water

Jun8

I have a plant in my house commonly known as a peace lily. It’s real name is spathiphyllum. When it gets thirsty, it really lets you know: the leaves wilt and hang down like it’s bearing the weight of the world on it’s slender stalks. When I see it like that, I grab the nearest unemptied glass of water I can find (they’re usually plentiful around my house) and give it a nice drink. Within an hour or so, it’s perked back up again. It’s a thriving plant, really. To look at it, you wouldn’t guess that it often has to tell me in no uncertain terms that it wants water. I don’t water it on any regular schedule. In fact, when it was getting watered daily, it didn’t bloom. I’m no horticulturist, but I wonder if there are plants that need just a little bit of drought to cause them to bloom.

I think our spiritual lives are like that. We always have a source of Living Water to which we can go on a daily basis. But it’s when we’re in a desert that we bloom. The lessons learned in the hard times are what cause us to grow. We don’t want to live in the desert, where the view of plush plants and grass is missing, but neither should we look at the desert as a place of death. Sometimes our thirst is the only thing that reminds us that we need the Living Water.

“For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; He will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17).

*disclaimer: the pictured peace lily is not mine 🙂

Thankful today for:

351. a job well done

352. help

353. a slower schedule

354. a spontaneous play date

355. clean clothes

356. the color green, except when it’s at the bottom of my fish tank