Daily Lesson for January 8, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Exodus chapter 17 verses 3 through 6:

3 But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” 4 So Moses cried to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready ato stone me.” 5 And the Lord said to Moses, “Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6 Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.”

I have written before of cowboy poet and friend Andy Wilkinson's line about the Llano Estacado being a place "where rain must be dug up before a crop can grow."

Water hidden in the earth is a metaphor for strength of character and inner resource -- for the spirit of God within.

This spring will not be found by looking up towards the heavens and waiting for them to open. That's the first prayer -- for something miraculous to fall from the sky.  But this hidden spring waits to be discovered after that first prayer goes unanswered -- when the God on the clouds fails to come.

That is when we begin to look elsewhere, not up and outward, but inward and deep. And it is there that we discover another, perhaps more amazing miracle -- the hidden miracle within which all this time was hidden, waiting to be discovered.

The Scriptures tells us to wait on the early and also on the latter rains. But how old are the runs which must be dug up?  They are the oldest rains -- hidden since time immemorial.  Hidden since the foundation of the world -- in us.

You've got to be pretty desperate to go digging for water. The skies have to be shut up for a long time to give reason for us to start digging and we've got to be thirsty -- desperate thirsty -- for us to finish. But the legend says there's water hidden in the rock; and the old timers say it's true. And when we get dry and thirsty enough we'll each pick up a spade or a staff and seek to find out for ourselves; and what we discover is an inner resource deep and miraculous enough to sustain us through even the driest and most difficult of times.