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As we wait for the big snow tonight, I think of those who settled this country. You can read something like Willa Cather’s O Pioneers. and get an idea, a pretty good idea, of what it was like to climb into that covered wagon, shake the reins, and head for the sunset. But our imagination takes us only so far, only so far into the prairie, over the Rockies, and on to the Pacific waves, and only so far into the mysteries of life because life is always a mystery. There is always something rather than nothing, and what that something is like is quite beyond the prairies of life.

Life needs water, and there is always water somewhere, on the prairies, in the desert; waterholes, oases. underground currents; somewhere there is the water of life, of biological life. And somewhere for each of us there is the water of eternal life. Long ago and far away a sinkhole opened up and the water of life vanished for three days when Jesus died, then the plume of life blew into the sky as Jesus rose again, and now we need fear no longer of drying up and collapsing, dry as death, on the desert of life. Now however limited our imagination, we can reach ahead to our own sunrise forever beyond the setting sun of life’s barren deserts.