Other Pieces of history ......
Several years ago, we wondering through the graveyards in our town...way in the back corner was several old plots with marble gravestones for Chinese people...I don't know their story but found out other information as I searched..
The Chinese had helped build railroads through the area in the 1800's....as well as gardens for fresh food to the town... Their gardens were where the present day city park stands...they dug, by hand, ditches from the river to their gardens and one of those ditches was right below our office building and can still be seen today....so we walked it one day,..some of it has been dozed for buildings or roads, but a lot still exists..not connected to the river anymore ...
They had come by that industriousness honestly....when we flew in various parts of China and drove along the roads,we saw those similar ditches built by generations of people to dry hillsides making gardens wherever they could...walking paths to their plots of ground...not tractor paths..hoeing by hand their corn, and whatever vegetables they had planted..making the dry land lush with productivity...just as they did in our little town...
The ditches have deteriorated, but the legacy still lives on....people are still planting gardens, making the desert bloom, feeding livestock and families...
In Bible times, the people dug wells and named them or knew whose they were...they fought over them, springs in the desert...towns, cities grew near the water...we need water to survive....the desert is still productive in the Bible lands, using that life giving water...
We need that water for life...we need that living water that only Jesus gives as well...so that our lives are not deserts, but living, always satisfied with Him, keeping the channels open and well repaired for His life to flow through us..
Thank YOU for life giving water...help me to give that water to others...cultivating lush gardens of life....
Genesis 26:15 So all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the Philistines stopped up, filling them with earth.
Deuteronomy 6:10-12 When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
Isaiah 12:3 With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.
John 4:6-15 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” For Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Psalm 107:33-38 He turned rivers into a desert, flowing springs into thirsty ground, and fruitful land into a salt waste..... He turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs; there he brought the hungry to live,and they founded a city where they could settle. They sowed fields and planted vineyards that yielded a fruitful harvest;......
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