Yesterday the House of Lords science and technology committee criticised the government for failing to consider water supply when planning new homes in the south east of England. Last month we had the hosepipe ban despite the wettest May in 23 years. As one whose ancestors spent forty years wandering in the Sinai desert, I sometimes find it hard to believe that Britain – one of the soggier places on God’s earth – might be short of water. Yet it is, and that means that we have to think deeply about planning for the future.
The Hebrew Bible is full of concern about the lack of rainfall. No sooner does Abraham arrive in the promised land than there is a drought, a famine, and he has to go into temporary exile. Moses is continually challenged to find water for the people he has led out of Egypt into the wilderness. And I’m fascinated by the way, at the end of his life, he told the next generation how water supply would be a constant problem in the holy land, as it still is today.
The land you are about to enter, he says in the book of Deuteronomy (Dt. 11: 10-12), isn’t like Egypt, where there is always water. You’ll need rain. What he was intimating wasn’t just a matter of climate and geography – but something immensely relevant today. The cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, were situated at points where water was plentiful: the Tigris Euphrates valley and the Nile delta. The land to which you are travelling, said Moses, is different. There you won’t worship the endless rhythms of nature. Instead, you’ll be confronted, year after year, with the unpredictability of rainfall. You’ll learn that faith is the ability to live with uncertainty. You’ll find yourself not looking down to the earth but up at the inscrutable sky. There you’ll learn what it is to pray.
In this age of global warming, water may become for us what it once was for the people of the Hebrew Bible, a symbol of the fragility of human life on earth and the importance of planning not just for tomorrow but for next year, the next generation, the next century. If that reminds us that we live in a world of scarce resources we’re consuming far too rapidly, resources whose guardians we are for the sake of generations not yet born, we might yet learn to conserve, not just consume; and to thank God not just for this glorious June morning, but also for a rainy day.
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