“There Is a River Whose Streams Make Glad…”
Some of you will recognize the above, if not by literary source then by sentiment. In Cook County, we’ve many rivers, as well as many streams, and many smaller water runways (rivulets, brooks, creeks). What they are called as the type doesn’t matter, and neither does the designated name on the map or the name they are called by in the community where they flow. What is important to most of us is that the rivers stream along and make us glad, and, as well, make critters, fish, birds, amphibians, bees, beetles, bugs, and a myriad of aquatic “whatevers” glad by giving them sustenance for life.
Clean water, fresh water, babbling water, icing over and thawing water, they make a way for us to forget, at least momentarily, what might be seeming wrong. It’s been a week, and before that several months, of excitement, dismay, anxiety, uncertainty, worry that our neighbor disagrees with us, worry that we aren’t saying well enough what we mean so that it comes out wrong and makes others very un-glad. This election year has been tough; maybe that is why the Brule River in Hovland, the Pigeon River in Grand Portage, and probably most others, have seemed so extra busy. Maybe people have been needing relief and finding something that “makes glad.”
Maybe it is precisely times like these that God builds into us humans an appreciation of water falling over rocks, across sand bars, and into eddies. It gives us relief from the trials of life and gives us something that the eyes and ears delight in. Walk to the High Falls of the Pigeon River, most any time of year, and see streams (and waterfalls!) that make us glad. Looking down through layers of water and sprays of droplets, see the ruggedness of the earth over which the waters flow. To people of faith, this may be a metaphor for faith. Our tumbling, climbing, rolling, spraying lives are carried by the enduring rock beneath the surface. Oh yes, there are folks for whom belief in God, or Creator, or Higher Power is absent. But even then (for I was once among those folks) there is often recognition that strength that runs beneath ourselves carries us further than we can go on our own.
The fuller quote for the title of this piece is “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the most high” (Psalm 46:4). It makes me happy to think of rivers and streams that make me glad and make so many others glad. And at the same time, this makes not only God glad but the whole city of God! Which, when I ponder such a far-reaching statement, is the Kingdom of God, where we (knowing or not) reside.
And so I begin to realize: We can’t guarantee that the Pigeon and Brule and other Cook County rivers will remain filled with clean water, but we can work toward that. We can’t ensure that some terrific impact of climate shifts that bring greater rains and higher waters and stronger winds won’t erode the rocky course the waters of the Pigeon flow through— but we can work to reduce a little (or a lot) of what we humans do that might make our streams and rivers less healthy for themselves and their environment (which is our environment as well).
And you know what? We can gladden one another’s heart, just by working together for something that makes each of us glad. And by that, we can know that we become a river whosestreams make-glad one another, and especially, the City of God.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month our contributor is Pastor Kris Garey, Trinity Lutheran Church, Hovland.
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