The Sea That Became a Desert

In 1960, the Aral Sea straddled the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as the fourth-largest lake on earth. Fishing boats crowded its ports. Children swam its shoreline. Entire communities built their lives around its abundance.

Then Soviet planners diverted the rivers that fed it, channeling the water into vast cotton fields. Scientists warned them. Local fishermen pleaded. Everyone could see what was coming. They did it anyway.

Within a generation, the sea retreated like a dying breath. By the 1990s, rusted fishing trawlers sat stranded in open desert, their hulls half-buried in toxic salt flats. The town of Moynaq, once a bustling port, found itself over a hundred miles from the nearest shoreline. Dust storms carrying pesticides swept across what had been the sea floor, poisoning the very people who had depended on its waters.

Jeremiah saw something like this in his vision — a fruitful land reduced to wilderness, towns lying in ruins, the birds of the air fled, the earth itself formless and void. Not because of some random catastrophe, but because God's people were, as the prophet said, "skilled in doing evil" yet did "not know how to do good." They chose, and chose, and chose again — until the scorching wind came, too fierce for winnowing, fit only for judgment.

Yet even at the Aral Sea, a small northern section has been restored. And even in Jeremiah's darkest oracle, the Almighty declares, "I will not destroy it completely." Judgment is real. But so is the remnant of mercy.