Jun 26. The word for today.

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. Matthew 5:45 (King James version)

Is that good or bad?

In the Nordic countries sun is good, the more sun the better. People get out as early as possible in the Spring to catch as much sunshine as possible. In late fall, when the sun almost never shines cabin fever starts to set in, and a temporary cure for cabin fever is drinking, so the problem of alcoholism gets worse the further north you get.

In the 10 to 40 degrees latitude region the problem is the opposite. There is an Arabic proverb that says “All sunshine makes a desert”. In India and China people tend to avoid sunshine as much as possible, white skin is a great advantage to have, or one could be mistaken for a common laborer.

We must have sunshine, or nothing will grow. Another thing without which nothing will grow is water, so the second part of the word for today, rain, is that good or bad? Here in the U.S, if you live more than 500 miles west of the Mississippi river rain is good, if you live east of that, too much rain is bad, it can lead to flooding.

But God is no respecter of persons. God gives the same weather to the good and the evil, the just and the unjust. It is what we do about it that makes a difference. There is a Norwegian saying “there is no bad weather, only bad clothes”. But that is from a country without hurricanes and tornadoes. In some places their main source of rain is from hurricanes, typhoons or cyclones, dependent on in which ocean they form.

And so it was: The first treaty in the Bible was about water: See Genesis 21:

The battle of Beersheba occurred in 1917, when the Turks of the Ottoman Empire were routed.

Leading the charge was the Fourth Light Horse Brigade. They look more like camels to me.

The battle in the Middle East started about water, and is always partly about water.

The American West is also all about water. A farm without water rights is essentially worthless. A century ago the Colorado River Basin had a population of about 5 million people, now over 40 million people use the water from the Colorado river. In less than 20 years Lake Mead will be emptied, it is now down to 34 percent of capacity, a new all time low since the lake was first filled.

This calls for action, but there is no mentioning of what needs to be done in the proposed infrastructure bill, so I guess it leaves the American South-west high and dry.

It is high time for us all to pray that sanity will return to Congress and that they will start to tackle the real problems this country is facing. If this problem is not solved there will be man-made climate change. The problem is water, not CO2.