“O let all who thirst,
Let them come to the water
And let all who have nothing,
Let them come to the Lord.”
Today’s post is part two in a six part series on the works of mercy. I could talk about spiritual thirst, which is something we all have in common. We all thirst for God, even if we don’t know that’s what we’re thirsting after. Only God and his love can quench the thirst for more that we all share. I suspect that most of you know this already, at least on a good day. Instead, I am going to talk about quenching physical thirst with clean sources of water.
It’s hard to imagine in a nation as wealthy as ours in the 21st century, people lacking clean, safe drinking water or indoor plumbing. When I survey my home in a modest middle-class neighborhood and count our two bathrooms, four sinks, dishwasher, washer and dryer, and even a little water fountain in my refrigerator, it’s almost unfathomable how people live without water at their fingertips. Yet they do. So many of our brothers and sisters do.
Not A Drop To Drink
Nearly 1 in 8 people worldwide, or just less than 1 billion people, lack access to safe drinking water. That doesn’t mean no indoor plumbing. It means that nearly 1 billion people on the planet only have access to water that is dirty or compromised in some way. So what happens when people lack access to safe drinking water? Nothing good.
4,000 children die each day from lack of safe drinking water.
Every 22 seconds a child dies from a waterborne disease like typhoid, cholera, or dysentery. Many of those waterborne diseases cause diarrhea, the second leading cause of death for all children under age 5 worldwide.
On the other hand, a clean, sustainable water supply cuts a community’s child mortality rate in half.
It’s not just children who are affected by lack of water. The United Nations has estimated that over 200 million hours are spent world wide daily by women traveling to collect water for domestic use (cooking, cleaning, hygiene, washing). That lost time equals about 3 billion dollars per year in lost wages for people who survive each day on the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Two out of every three people who need safe drinking water live on less than $2 a day. One in three survive on less than $1 daily.
Even in the US, land of plenty, over one million Americans still lack indoor plumbing.
We are so blessed. If you are reading this, you are blessed beyond belief. Because if you are reading this, you probably have access to clean drinking water, and indoor plumbing. Something that 1 billion of our brothers and sisters in Christ worldwide are literally dying for.
Let it sink in. Get up, go from room to room and turn on your sinks. Get a glass of cold, refreshing water from your tap, or your fridge. Splash some water on your hands or face and offer a prayer of thanksgiving. Offer a prayer for online casino all those mothers and fathers and babies who go without. When you finish your water, your prayer, come back. It”s time to move on.
Give Them Drink
Sorry to be so solemn, but this is a problem worth being solemn over. As painful as it might be to read those facts and imagine the faces of the people who they belong to, we must. Christ himself demands it in Matthew 25. He demands that we give drink to the thirsty. Surely our Lord would not demand from us something we were not capable of doing. Paralysis often sets in when we look around at our “have” and realize just how much it really is, how much others “have not”. Paralysis is not of God, my friends. Neither is guilt for the blessings and luxuries we have. Both, however, are works of the Enemy, tools he would use to keep us from following Christ’s command.
So what can we do here to help them there?
One of the best things to do is to find sustainable water projects to support. Both World Vision and Catholic Relief Services have water projects in several nations in the developing world. These organizations are doing good things to help provide safe, clean water, and could be places to support in offering drink to the thirsty.
Another organization, Living Water International, is a Christian organization dedicated to providing “a cup of water in Jesus’ name”. I have been so impressed by their various campaigns and ways to get involved. Here are some great ideas:
Please watch the video, it”s wonderful.
This whole concept is about giving presence, not presents. The money that is saved by giving gifts of time and relationship, can then be used to purchase “water gift cards”. The gift cards are for a certain amount. You give the card as you would any other gift card. The recipient then goes to LWI’s website and chooses which nation and which water project his gift will be given to.
The beauty of this project is that it involves sacrifice. It asks you to put your money where your mouth is, literally. When someone participates in the H2O Project, they pledge to drink only water for a certain period of time. Then, figure out how much money they would have spent on other beverages (coffee, tea, soda, alcohol), and donate that amount to sustainable water projects. This would be an excellent idea for Lent.
If you”re a runner, you could do a race collecting sponsors for any of the above organization”s water projects.
If you feel so called, you could travel with a delegation from one of these groups and work directly with the people who need this life-saving, life-giving water.
We don’t have as many opportunities for directly giving drink to the thirsty, because thankfully, we live in a nation where 99.5% of the population has access to safe drinking water. However, that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook on this particular work of mercy. Rather, it means we have to get more creative about how we meet the needs of those who lack what we take for granted every day.
1 thought on “Thirst Quenching”
Thank you for afflicting the comfortable and giving us a swift kick to look at our checkbook. Pastor Tim and Pastor Pat have told us that our calendars and our checkbooks are what reveal us as being true Christians or as being pretending Christians.