Wateraid's U.S. website:
As we view our beautiful, crystal blue Earth from space, the one thing that is the most noticeable is the abundance of water on our planet. More than 71% of earth's surface is covered by oceans.* Life on our planet is believed to have begun in the ocean and life for the newborn begins in his own private ocean within his mother. Water incubates life on almost every level of life.
It is life's most necessary element. More than food, shelter or even safety, it is water that sustains life.
It's most interesting that Jesus ministry begins with His baptism by John the Baptist and that new converts to Judaism first go through a mikveh. Jesus used the image of water, flowing as a river, to symbolize life in the Spirit. It is the Spirit that brings life and it flows, fresh and life giving, always from the source. He told his followers, and everyone else for that matter, if they would follow him, he would lead them to a river that springs up into eternal life. He likened God's life giving Spirit to wine. It too is flowing, crystal clean with a transformative essence. We know that wine certainly changes us - albeit temporarily - making us giddy and happy, briefly. It is fluid, with anti-aging and even some healing properties, and to further use his analogy, it comes from the "true vine," which is God.
Our lives would be changed as we are transformed, awakened, enlightened by God's spirit, and Jesus used the images of water being changed into wine as an example of how our lives would be restored, enlivened, joyously healed when we sipped of God's great spring of Spirit. He even takes the analogy to an incredibly profound level by suggesting that once we are "wedded" to God, our ordinary lives will be profoundly changed as water is changed into wine.
How does anyone do that, really? How do we respond to God's invitation to drink His "wine" and become healed and whole? Responding to God's invitation to drink wine is allowing God to open our hearts, to become compassionate, and then to step into a higher level of being, a state of being compassionate. When we are compassionate, we find a greater ability, a freed up nature, to want to help others, to show others the same love that we feel. So, Christians found themselves going to the baptismal font to ritualize their newfound experience of being reborn, changed forever, by the power of God's spirit, God's "wine." It's this wine that invokes compassion in us. I don't think we need to go looking for it because it's right there, scripted on your own human heart, but we can respond to it and it is in that response that we change. By acting on our compassion, we are inviting God's Spirit - his Wine - to flow into us and that is what changes us. And, it makes us sublimely happy, as well. What if we listened with to our compassion to revisit a planet more than 70% covered with water that desperately needs our compassion. Could we change that water with God's "wine?"
Water should not be a luxury for anyone, since there is so much of it to go around. Like air, it should be available to everyone, everywhere. And, not only for those who live in industrialized nations where the water is purified, but for all people, animals and plants, everywhere. Even as the planet languishes with a sick fever due to a global inflammation of our making, the polar ice caps are melting, and rising levels of water are threatening coastal cities, and still the poorest of the poor are thirsty.
Their thirst is our thirst. If we turn away, we are diminished by an unquencable spiritual thirst, a sense of separation and lonliness, perhaps the worst kind of poverty. If we respond to our hearts to compassionately give them water, clean up their polluted rivers and streams, ensure clean sewer services, our hearts open to God who responds to our compassion with an increase in His water supply in our lives, in the living presence of His Spirit, which refuels our lives expoentially.
Today, I offer you Wateraid and invite you to consider how giving to the children in a far off region of the world, helps you. It's obvious what it will do for them. What will it do for you? By giving water to those languishing without water, you are opening your heart to God, who will fill you with His Spirit, joy and power, new wine for this time and place. Your compassion is the ultimate baptism and the ultimate sacrament of God's presence among us.
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* "Salt water oceans make up 71% of the Earth’s surface, which the other 29% made up of the Earth’s continents and islands. But there are also freshwater lakes and glaciers that cover the Earth’s surface.
Of all the water on Earth, 97.5% is contained within the oceans, while the remaining 2.5% is freshwater lakes and frozen water locked up in glaciers and the polar ice caps – almost 69% of the fresh water on Earth is ice." Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/65588/what-percent-of-earth-is-water/#ixzz2hhryyWLo
** "The mikveh is a ritual bath designed for the Jewish rite of purification. The mikveh is not merely a pool of water; it must be composed of stationary, not flowing, waters and must contain a certain percentage of water derived from a natural source, such as a lake, an ocean, or rain. Both men and women have used the mikvehfor ritual purification." (http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/mikveh)
*** Hindu devotees believe that by entering the mighty Gangees river during the religious festival, the Kumbh Melathey, they are cleansed of sin and freed from the karmic cycle of rebirth. The bathing takes place in an area known as the Sangam at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers "and a third mythical waterway called the Saraswati." Known as "Mauni Amavasya," the ritual bathing day is the "most auspicious" in the month-long festival which takes place every twelve years.
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