Dry, barren hearts or living water?

There’s a strange lake situated in the dry heart of Australia, that great red island continent of feral beauty and strange, alien life-forms. At 15 meters below sea level, Lake Eyre is Australia’s lowest point, and often it’s hottest. Summer temperatures regularly reach the 50 degrees Celsius (122 F +) range while a reading of 61 C (141 F) has been reported.   

The drainage basin of the lake covers approximately 1.2 million square kilometers of arid Central Australia. That’s an area twice the size of the US state of Texas. The lake covers 9690 square kilometers, making it the 5^th largest terminal lake in the world although it seldom contains water.  A terminal lake is one that does not eventually empty into the sea. 

The highest recorded level in Lake Eyre was in 1974. The out-flow of the Mississippi would fill Lake Eyre to that level in twenty-two days, and the Amazon in three days.From a distance the lake looks almost normal; a sky blue oasis in a burnt red desert, but close up the lake is white, a shimmering salt pan, the by-product of the intense evaporation that sucks every ounce of moisture from the shallow waters, leaving behind a bath of chemical compounds.

When Lake Eyre was discovered by Edward John Eyre in 1839, it was thought to be an out-pouring of the great artesian basin that lies beneath more than half of the country’s deserts. Within a year or two of its discovery it returned to its normal state of salty mud. It has only been full six times since Australia’s European settlers found it.

When the occasional rains fill the lake, it becomes temporary home to millions of pelicans, banded stilts, silver gulls and many other water birds, which begin to arrive within 24 hours of the first trickles of water seeping through the salt crust. They arrive to feast upon the sudden burst of algae, which is followed by the rapid breeding of millions of fish, the eggs of which have lain dormant in the mud since previous floods.

The status of a safe haven to bird and fish life lasts only as long as the shallow lake is being fed water by its massive catchment basin, then the vicious cycle of evaporation takes over, and with in a few months the lake is a salt pan again. In a continent that is the second driest landmass on the planet, water is “worth its weight in gold”, and such a lake is a cruel trick.

As believers it’s too easy to become the spiritual equivalent of Lake Eyre. We can look so good on the outside, from a distance, but within, our hearts are often dry and empty of the life-giving force that non-Christians are so desperately seeking. Jesus said that we could become the well-spring of life…  “Rivers of living water will brim and spill out of the depths of anyone who believes in me this way, just as the Scripture says.” John 7:38 MKJV

The Greek word for living water is potamos and it literally means a flood, as in a river in flood.

Surface water is prone to stagnation and evaporation, and often harbours illness-causing bacteria and viruses.

Nothing living about that water!

Water that wells up from the great deep is fresh, charged with life and vitality. Such should be that which springs from within us…. Filled with light, life, love, and liberty, and all the other graces of the indwelling Spirit, from the indwelling Christ.

Our very words are to be life-giving; “The mouth of a good person is a deep, life-giving well, but the mouth of the wicked is a dark cave of abuse”. Proverbs 10:11 

In ancient times in the Holy Land towns were known by the quality and taste of their water…. David had a sudden craving: “What I wouldn’t give for a drink of water from the well in Bethlehem, the one at the gate!” 
1 Chronicles 11:17

King David's wells, Bethlehem

David so craved this water that three of his mighty men actually men broke through the army of the Philistines, and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem. (2 Samuel 23:15-17) 

I don’t know about you, but I cannot recall someone going to that trouble to get a taste of the living water that is supposed to flow out of my spirit!

Are you a “terminal lake”, or a well-spring of life?