The Creek Went Under the Stones

The creek went under in the first week of July, which is early, and it has not come back up.

She has watched that creek her whole life. It goes down every summer to a trickle in the deep places and a damp line in the shallow ones, and then in August it usually comes back a little, and this year it did not. It went under the stones and the stones went pale and there is a smell to a dry creek bed that anybody who has grown up near one would recognize.

The pasture is finished. They are feeding hay in September, which they have not done since her husband's father's time.

And in the same summer, in a way she has told nobody about because there is nobody to tell it to who would not immediately try to help, something went under in her.

She is not depressed. She would want that on the record and she has thought about it carefully. She is not sad, she sleeps, she eats, she does the work. What she means is that she used to be able to feel things about God in the ordinary run of a day and she has not for about four months.

She cannot tell the two dry things apart any more. She has tried. She has stood at the creek bed and not known which one she was looking at.

The sentence, unsaid: everything is going under at the same time and I do not know which one is mine.

You may know that summer. Two dry things at once, and no way to separate them.

The green leaf is not about the rain

There is a verse in Jeremiah that describes a tree in exactly her weather, and it makes a claim that would sound absurd to a farmer if it were about rainfall.

For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.Jeremiah 17:8

Read what the verse concedes. Heat comes. There is a year of drought. Jeremiah does not promise weather; he names it, twice, as part of the picture.

And then the claim. The leaf stays green anyway, and the reason given has nothing to do with the sky. It is where the roots went. The tree is described as having spread its roots out to the river, which is a thing that happened over years and is not being done during the drought.

You are held by where the roots went and not by this summer's rain, and Jeremiah 17:8 puts the green leaf and the year of drought in the same sentence on purpose, and it is His Spirit who takes a picture from a prophet and lands it on a woman standing at a dry creek bed in September.

Two water tables

Consider what a farmer knows that makes this verse land harder than it lands on anybody else.

There is surface water and there is what is underneath. The creek is surface. It responds to this month, and it goes and it comes and it tells you about the last six weeks and nothing more.

The other water is deeper and slower and it is not visible at all, and a tree with roots into it will be green in a year when the creek has gone under the stones. That is not a spiritual metaphor being stretched. That is how it actually works in the ground she is standing on.

You have a supply that the creek was never reporting on, because the written word puts the roots at the river and the drought in the air and refuses to connect them, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a fact about groundwater into something she can stand on in September.

And notice the phrase shall not be careful. In older English that means shall not be anxious. The tree is not described as watching the weather. It is described as not having to, which is a strange freedom to offer somebody who feeds hay in September.

You are not the one responsible for watching the sky, and Jeremiah 17 gives the tree freedom from anxiety rather than freedom from drought, and the same Spirit who inspired that image is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

A failed pasture, hay in September, and four months of nothing felt, all in the same summer, is a real weight and it does not become lighter for being quiet. Tell a doctor plainly about the four months, in those words, because a sustained change like that is medical information and not a report on her faith. Ask about a counselor, and do it before the winter rather than after it, because the winter on a dry farm is long. And tell one person outside the family, plainly, that she cannot tell the two dry things apart, because that sentence is much heavier to hold alone than it is to say.

And if the flatness has begun to go somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Saying it out loud is not a failure of nerve. You are held exactly as much in the summer you say it as in the four months you did not, because Jeremiah 17:8 puts the green leaf and the drought in one sentence without asking the tree to explain either, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that true in the body rather than only in an image.