25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
Usually when we hear that story, we think of the great spiritual lesson it teaches and how we should build our faith on the rock of Jesus. Now, we have to think of what a parable is. A parable is a story told using real world situations to describe a spiritual truth, so, when Jesus was talking about where to build a house, he was talking real world and literal sense to the people in a way that they could understand it and apply it to the spiritual.
Hence we come to the real topic that I want to talk about today, and that is flooding. Many parts of the uper plains into the great lakes have experienced copious amounts of rain this year. Some places have gotten almost 3 times the amount of rain as they normally get for the month of June. As of this writing there are still a couple days left to go, and both of which feature lots of rain across those same areas.
As a result of all of this rain, flooding has begun occurring. We are getting the flash flooding from the rains flowing down to the rivers, and then we are getting the rivers flooding from all the water flowing into them. These floods are inundating towns across river basins all through the middle part of the country. It is a terrible, costly and growing disaster that is really only in its early stages and a story we will be hearing more and more about as the summer progresses.
Some places are experiencing even worse flooding as a result of man trying to control the flooding. You see, flooding is a normal part of a rivers life. It is designed to do that and it makes the land surrounding the rivers extremely fertile. Because of the great lands, people have moved to these areas.
Because people moved to these areas they began to experience the effects from flooding. Man, of course, being the "wise" creature that he is, devised and developed plans. No, the plans were not to move out of the flood prone areas, but to keep the river from flooding those areas. Man built dams and dikes in an effort to keep the people of the river communities safe from the flood waters.
Initially this seemed to do the trick. Through mans water control efforts, the river was no longer flooding every year and people could live along the river in relative safety... or so they thought. While mans efforts did solve the problem of the annual floods the rivers normally experience, they created a new problem. This was the problem of the major flood.
Every so often, like this year, areas get into a rainy stretch and overwhelm the man made system. Dams fail. Dikes are them over-topped at first, then erode away and collapse. Then, instead of getting a lower flood more often, you get a sudden rush of gigantic volumes of water rushing into the river communities and flood the areas like no one had ever seen before. We began calling them 100 year floods, 500 year floods, all the while never realizing that we were the ones causing it.
Rather than being wise people and building our communities in safer areas away from the flood waters, we were foolish and built right in the sand. Then rather than recognizing our folly, we doubled down and thought we could outdo God and control the raging waters. Well, that turned out to be rather foolish as well. Now the rains have come and the wind is beating on those communities and they are falling. Once again we will be defiant and rather than moving to safer ground, we will spend billions of dollars to put people right back in harms way.
I think we need to follow the wisdom of god and build our communities on the solid ground where the waters won't wash them away, and we won't have to spend billions of dollars every year trying to fight the waters and rebuild the damage. The wisdom of God is not just spiritual, but extremely practical as well. We would be wise to follow it.
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