When we first moved here, probably the most distressing thing to me was the water. After living down by the river, with three wonderful creeks at our disposal, not to mention all the springs pouring out of the side of our mountain, to have less than ideal water was a real disappointment.
Not only was the water a disappointment, it was scary! The very first week we were here, I was busily washing my laundry in the dirty water, when I started itching like crazy! Every place the water touched me itched so bad that pretty soon I was frantically scratching while the tears poured down my face. I found out later that a certain kind of flower pollen was probably to blame for the itching.
By that time, we decided to go and check to see where our water supply was coming from. Sure enough….it came from a dirty, scummy frog pond! Well, at least now we knew why there were so many tadpoles bathing with us!
After describing our water situation in one of my newsletters, a friend of mine wrote to me and asked if we would mind if she prayed for abundant clean water. I am certainly not crazy enough to turn down an offer like that, but I wondered how in the world that would ever be possible.
About a month later, our water situation became desperate! The buffalo had discovered our frog pond and were using it as a wallow. Now, our water was as muddy as could be, and it stunk like dirty buffalo mixed with tad poles! Yuck! Even Jason, who always tried to remain positive about the water, had had enough.
So, one afternoon he disappeared up the hill with a hoe in hand. Within an hour or two, he came back grinning. He had found a spring, dug it out, and was coming back to find pipes to get the water to our place. All available hands went to work, and that same afternoon we had sparkling clean water trickling into a bucket on our own land. We had clean water to drink for the first time since moving here!
The only problem was that all our different sized pipes were leaking at the joints, so not much water was getting down here….besides the fact that it was a rather small spring to start with. But, Jason had been given a thousand gallon water tank that was all cracked and broken which he was determined to fix and use for a holding tank for our trickle of water. So, over the next week, the tank was fixed, we bought new water pipe, lots of digging and leveling were done, and our tank was installed.
Meanwhile, almost miraculously, more and more water came rushing down our pipe. We now have over a thousand gallons of pure, clean spring water at our disposal every day! Washing our laundry in clean, non-itchy water, bathing without our little tadpole friends, drinking water without green algae in it equals nothing less than pure bliss!
So we are praising God for our abundant clean water, and for the friend with enough faith to pray for it!