Spring water or cistern water... ?

As summer temperatures soar in southern Spain, you begin to notice that every river you see, every arroyo that passes under your motorway bridge, is completely dry. There's a huge network of rivers in Andalucía, but at this time of year they are nothing more than dry, sandy or pebbly river beds. One politician has described them as "wounds" across the face of the region.

The reason, you see, is that the government has built a series of strategically placed dams to gather the water and protect us from drought in the endlessly dry summer months. These dams create beautiful lakes (in the above photo, I'm swimming near the Agujero dam in Málaga) and they mean that we always have sufficient supply of drinking water.... but it also results in those dozens of dry river beds across the landscape. 

When there are no constantly flowing sources of water, like we see in winter, it means that wildlife (notably the deer) need to wander far in search of a place to drink. I've seen quite a few deer recently in the forest close to where I live. I was surprised to see them so close to the town, and realised it's because there are almost no water sources in the Sierra de Mijas. It's a living illustration of Psalm 42 vs 1: As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul longs for You, the Living God. Fortunately, the deer are usually in the mountain regions, where there are streams that flow all year, because of the snow-melt that births the rivers in the sierras. Most of us, however, are drinking water from reservoirs and not from flowing springs.

It reminds me of a Bible verse that made an impact on me when I was still a young Christian. In Jeremiah 2: 13, God reproaches His people for two sins: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, cracked cisterns that can no longer hold water.

Cisterns are not a bad thing. Like our Spanish "lakes," they make sure that you have a supply of drinking water available - water that at one point in the past was fresh and flowing. God certainly isn't against our building a storehouse of insights and understanding that He has given to us over years of reading and meditating on His Word. But when I first read that verse as a young believer, I realised it was warning me of a danger we could so easily fall into: the danger of depending on "old revelation" and our accumulated knowledge, instead of pushing in daily to receive fresh, life-giving revelation from God Himself. As the Hebrews in the desert discovered: old manna won't last; we need a fresh source on a regular basis.

I am thankful for the dozens of journals that I have filled over decades of spending time daily with the Lord... but I don't want the landscape of my life to be scattered with dry river beds. I want to be able to proclaim with the singers at the end of Psalm 87: all of my springs/sources are in You.