Don’t Let Your Well Gradually Run Dry

23 July 2026  Jeremiah 2:1-3,7-8,12-13

“They have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that hold no water.”

(Jeremiah 2:13)

John Wesley Powell was one of the most significant Americans who was never president. He was the third head of the U.S. Geological Survey, and shortly after the Civil War he conducted two extensive surveys of the American West. He reported back that to make the western U.S. productive, it would be necessary to conserve every drop of water possible, and to do that meant planning for the protection of watersheds, and technology like dams, canals, and reservoirs not months or years in advance, but decades.

Most people lose their faith because their spiritual roots never went very deep, and they didn’t notice when things started to get a little dry. Their faith wasn’t torn away as much as it was set down, and never picked up again.

His recommendations were finally adopted in the Newlands Act of 1902, visionary legislation that has made the American west some of the most productive land in the world.

If you don’t plan like that, the water doesn’t run out all at once. The land gets a little drier all the time, and the people on it just get used to being dry. They may find over time that they need to move, and they do, and they get used to moving. Over time they just kind of forget how they used to be.

Jeremiah lived in an arid place, and like John Wesley Powell, he understood water, and the want of it. He used it as a metaphor of the spiritual life. If you don’t have a long term plan, if you don’t take care of your spiritual watersheds, canals and reservoirs, things get a little drier all the time. Then somebody moves – graduates from high school, maybe, and goes to college, a place that is even drier and less inclined to tend shriveling spiritual roots. They move again – graduate from college and maybe get married, and can’t remember the way they were before. It’s not like there is a noticeable war going on against their spiritual life, a mighty host of demons, horrible with weapons and banners, or squadrons of secularist professors, interrupting lectures on calculus with flaming denunciations of the Gospel. That isn’t the way most people lose their faith. Most people lose their faith because their spiritual roots never went very deep, and they didn’t notice when things started to get a little dry. Their faith wasn’t torn away as much as it was set down, and never picked up again. It wasn’t dramatic, but rather more the way C.S. Lewis described the most reliable road to hell: it is “the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts” (The Screwtape Letters, Letter 12).

Access to water, and the Living Water of God, means planning not months or years in advance, but decades. Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, thinks what Christians should do today is hunker down deep in their religious communities, making the building up and maintenance of those communities their most precious commitment until some more promising time comes. Scientist Stephen Meyer, however, author of The Return of the God Hypothesis, and principal writer of the 2026 documentary The Story of Everything, thinks it possible that the trajectory of modern science makes these days more promising than any in living memory for the witness of Christian theists. Whatever view proves to be the most accurate, it will certainly be a long view, one that plans far beyond tomorrow and the near future. It will make deep commitments to the maintenance of the Christian community, and make sure not to miss the opportunities within reach.

And it will have signposts, lots of signposts. It will declare the Good News loudly, clearly, and often because it is still true that the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few (Matthew 7:13-14).