Broken Wells in Flint

In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan switched its water source from the Detroit system — clean, treated, reliable — to the Flint River, a murky waterway long known for industrial contamination. The decision was about saving money. Officials assured residents everything was fine. But within months, the water ran brown from kitchen taps. Children tested positive for dangerous lead levels. Families who had once turned on the faucet without a second thought now lined up for bottled water in church parking lots, desperate for what they had freely possessed just months before.

Flint had a perfectly good water supply. Nobody forced them to abandon it. They chose to walk away from the source that had sustained them for decades, believing they could engineer something cheaper, something they controlled. And what they got instead was poison.

The Prophet Jeremiah stood before Israel with exactly this bewilderment in his voice. "My people have committed two evils," declared the Lord. "They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns — broken cisterns that can hold no water."

God was not some distant, unreliable source. He was the clean tap running fresh every morning. Yet Israel — like a city council chasing a budget line — traded the Almighty for gods that could not deliver, gods that leached toxins into their souls. Every broken cistern we dig today, whether career obsession, material accumulation, or relentless self-sufficiency, leaves us standing in line for what was already flowing freely from the hand of the Living God.